Exhibition

Koffler Gallery, 2014
Photo documentation by Toni Hafkenscheid

Vancouver-based artist Adad Hannah has earned an international reputation for his video-recorded tableaux vivants featuring staged models posing for an extended period. By stretching the captured moment and reinserting time into the still shot, Hannah deconstructs the photographic image, undermining its claim of truthfulness.

In this new body of work, Hannah focuses on his own biography, re-animating an instant captured eighteen years before he was born. His starting point is a yellowing photograph of his grandmother painting a portrait of her daughter at an art club on an American military base in Kodiak, Alaska in 1953. Hannah works in dialogue with his mother, Barbara Txi Hannah – the subject of the original photograph and an artist herself – collaborating to expand the moment under observation through a multi-media installation.

Using photography, video-recorded performance, audio, and set design, Hannah breathes new life into the original image. The reenactment of the Kodiak photograph is the centerpiece, along with the studio setting constructed for the video-shoot. Other findings from the family archives, his mother’s autobiographical photo-collages produced for this exhibition, and recent interviews with his 93-year old grandmother provide further insight into Hannah’s personal history. Source materials – including the original oil painting, an article from The Kodiak Bear  featuring the art club, and Hannah’s video portrait of his grandmother from an earlier series, Family Stills – attempt to complete the picture.

Positioning, for the first time, a family member as collaborator rather than as subject or model, Hannah pushes his practice deeper than ever into the exploration of what has historically been the most popular genre of photography – the family snapshot. Moreover, he continues to examine the conceptual and historical associations between the visual media of photography, painting and sculpture – revealing both artistic and museological strategies of exposure.

Drawing attention to the performance inherent within photography, Hannah creates space to reflect on the production and communication of meaning. With this investigation into a family’s archive, he considers the nature of memory within the familial context and specifically its significance and transmission among relatives and across generations.

Artist Info

Adad Hannah was born in New York in 1971, spent his childhood in Israel and England, and moved to Vancouver in the early 1980s. He currently lives and works in Vancouver. He has exhibited widely on the international scene, including the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul 2013), Museo Tamayo (Mexico City 2012), Prague Biennial 5 (2011), 5th International Video Art Biennial at the Israeli Center for Digital Art (Holon 2011), Canadian Biennial at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa 2011), Australian Centre for Photography (Sydney 2010), Liverpool Biennial (2010), Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, Connecticut 2010), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2008, 2009), Zendai MoMA (Shanghai 2009), Vancouver Art Gallery (2007), Ikon Gallery (Birmingham 2006), 4th Seoul International Media Art Biennale (2006), La Casa Encendida (Madrid 2006) and Viper Basel (2004). Hannah won the Toronto Images Festival Installation/New Media Award in 2004, and the Bogdanka Poznanović Award at Videomedeja 8. He has produced works at museums including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, Rodin Gallery (Seoul), and Prado Museum (Madrid). His works are in many public collections, and he is represented by Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain in Montreal and Equinox Gallery in Vancouver.