Alexander Hahn (1954)
Switzerland


Biography :

"Youth in Rapperswil, cantonal school in Wetzikon, 1974–1978 training at the Zurich School of Applied Arts. Paintings, drawings, from 1976 S8 films, video tapes, and performances. 1981–1982 Whitney Independent Study Program in New York; numerous Swiss and international scholarships, work contributions and awards, including the Federal Art Scholarship (1987, 1988, 1993), New York State Council on the Arts Media Production Grant (1988, 1989, 1990, 1995, 2008), 1991 DAAD scholarship, Berlin, 1992 World Wide Video Festival Installation Award, The Hague, 2007 work grant from the city of Zurich. Solo exhibitions (selection): 1995 Kunsthaus Zurich; 1996 International Center of Photography, New York; 1997 Bern Art Museum; 1999 New Berlin Art Association; 2002 Musée Jenisch, Vevey; 2007 Solothurn Art Museum and Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; 2008 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Alexander Hahn lived in New York until the end of the 1980s, in Berlin and Warsaw from 1991 to 1996, then alternately in New York and Zurich.

Hahn made his first tapes in New York at the Downtown Community Television Center, among others, and from 1982 onwards with Dieter Froese, in whose studio Dekart Video he earned part of his living. Inclusion of the home computer TI-99 (later the Macintosh) in the artistic work. 1984 White Columns, New York, solo exhibition of Cyborgs and Other New Machines, human machines made from electronic scrap and various materials. The tapes he produced include The Outer Plant, State of Being (both 1982–84) and Secret Sanctions (1986).

The annually recurring short artist-in-residence stays at the Experimental Television Center in Owego (from 1985) as well as the use of the Fairlight CVI, the first digital video synthesizer with sampling technology, shaped the following video works until 1990 in a formal sense, such as Dream of Zanzibar (performance with live video and computer 1985), Aviation Memories (1986), Viewers of Optics (1987), Dirt Site (1990), The Bernoulli Itinerary (installation 1990). A year of work at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome in 1990 enabled Hahn to implement a long-held project: The Kircher Itinerary, which includes the multi-channel installations Urbs Turrita - City of Towers, The Bernoulli Itinerary and Of Shadow and Light - Riddle of Images.

Hahn's work progresses along two constantly intersecting axes: from science to fiction on the one hand, and from autobiography to historical research on the other. The tapes created up to 1986 reflect their own performances or are populated by strangely depersonalized cyber beings and are combined into imaginary narrative strands using partially edited found footage material and words or writing. Accompanied by formal and content-related compression, a distrust of commonly postulated dualisms of reality and dreams, present and history is manifested: in this regard, largely seamless transitions in the flow of images and text. Instead of found material, there are almost exclusively our own photographs, searched for on numerous trips, in which reanimated photos and sparse but clearly recognizable quotes from art history are embedded.

Dream, memory, memory and commemoration, archive and storage in non-linear time horizons are essential for the videos, installations, texts and graphic, computer-generated works (inkjet prints) created in the 1990s and afterwards. The starting point is the artist's concrete living environment - captured with a camcorder and an unnoticed spy camera: close people and strangers, (historical) rooms, statues or landscapes, scientific objects, images or architectural fragments from past eras. On the computer he analyzes the recordings as if they were parts of a scientific or detective puzzle, of human existence in general, and, following a dreamlike logic, assembles them into new structures (Séance, 1997, 5 Anamorphoses, 2002, Moving Vast Amounts of Water to a Barren Place, 2004). His small New York apartment can be found again as a memory palace in the interactive work Luminous Point, 2007, or as an “encryption laboratory” in the images and prints constructed in a 3D program, such as The Artist's Studio as Encryption Lab, from 1996, or Bringing Things to a Standstill, from 2010."
(Source, website, SIK)

Works :
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