‘I never felt a part of this world,” Anohni begins on You Are My Enemy. “I reject the way that we live.” The career-spanning songs and cover versions she has selected for this show, entitled Wilderness, reiterate themes of exile and alienation, to which the answer (as a distorted prerecorded monologue explains) is the power of creativity to remake the world and the self. In the quarter-century since she emerged from the New York art scene, blessed by William Basinski and Lou Reed, Anohni has held fast to the belief that communication through art is of existential importance, and with such unwavering intensity that she makes most singers look like they’re just having a laugh.

Wilderness is typically rigorous. Anohni and her virtuosic band – Gaël Rakotondrabe on grand piano, Chris Vatalaro on percussion, Leo Abrahams on guitar and bass – play before a film of swans gliding through the night. Sometimes they change colour, but it really is just 90 minutes of swans. Even swans don’t want to look at swans for that long. It’s much more interesting to watch Anohni herself. With her peroxide-white mane and floor-length black robe, she resembles a cleric or a sorcerer. She barely speaks and, when she sings, she stands motionless but for the hands trembling by her sides, as if making her entire body a channel for her extraordinary, operatic voice and the words it carries.

Like Nina Simone, her closest precursor, she is a masterly interpreter – when Anohni covers a song, it stays covered. Songs as familiar as Reed’s Perfect Day or the traditional spiritual Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child become out-of-body experiences. From her own catalogue, the revelation comes when tracks from 2016’s eco-panic concept album Hopelessness shed their original electronic skins. Drone Bomb Me becomes a soul ballad, 4 Degrees whirls like Kate Bush, and the grand, violent climax of I Don’t Love You Anymore evokes both weather and war. The sound-mixing is uncannily good, from Anohni’s quavering a cappella to Vatalaro’s bloodcurdlingly harsh drum solo. There’s really nobody else who can deliver such extremes of beauty and terror. And swans.