Je suis malheureuse et heureuse

The photobook 'Je suis malheureuse et heureuse' presents Austrian-born, Paris-based artist Anaïs Horn's latest work on French author Anaïs Nin's early diaries, the 'Journal d'enfance', written at the age of 16 in 1919-1920. In its first pages, Nin sets the tone, describing her discovery about her coming of age, her life between 11 and 18: 'Je suis malheureuse et heureuse'. That is the core sentence and title of Horn's project, consisting of intimate portraits of girls between 11-18, shot at her studio at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Exactly 100 years after Nin's writings, Horn explores the magic and the problems of being a female teenager, the rites of passage, the timeless and the time-specific topics of female coming of age.