After watching a series of films with Isabelle Huppert in 2004, American artist Roni Horn wrote to the French actor: ‘[W]atching you is like looking out a window – but a window that opens onto a different view each time one looks. The window itself – constant, but what's beyond – changing. Perhaps you are a medium.’ Though Horn goes on to applaud Huppert's radiant transparency, her present-ness in front of the camera, she also understands the actor's intensity as a form of camouflage. Huppert appears to be herself whenever she exists on screen as someone other; she assumes the role of others in the very appearance of herself. Such camouflage could not be more different from what we know about the iconicity of other famous actors. It categorically challenges what theorists of acting since Greek antiquity have come to think about the relation of face and mask, subjectivity and role, identity and personhood. Marilyn Monroe remained Marilyn Monroe in each of her films and was revered by her audiences as such. Not so Isabelle Huppert. To present herself as other, for her, is to become herself. The frenetic pace of her performances, of taking on different roles, is the work of an exceptional con artist, however fragile her persona on screen may appear, however nuanced the voices may sound that resonate through her image. Huppert is an anti-icon. Rather than embodying an object of speechless devotion, of presenting the divine and transcendental in visual form, Huppert defies any effort to get a hold of her identity at close range. To arrest her image. To attach her to our expectations or attach us to her projected life. Window and medium alike, what defines Huppert as Huppert is her provocative ability to escape the audience's grasp in plain sight. She ‘uses the visible as the place to hide’.

Some of the central questions of Horn's remarkable work as a photographer, writer, sculptor, and book and installation artist since the 1980s have been: Can we sustain identity over time, and if so, how? How much change can something – the face of a teenager, the surface of a passing river, a landscape amid changing weather conditions – afford before we begin to perceive it as other?