MARIANA HAHN

Born in Schwaebisch Hall in the south of Germany, Mariana Hahn studied theater at ETI in Berlin and has a degree in Fine Art from Central St. Martins in London (2012). Following her performance of I Sweat You in MOMENTUM’s emerging artist series About Face (2012), Hahn has twice more exhibited in the gallery: Burn My Love, Burn, which was shown as part of the exhibition Missing Link (2013), and Empress of Sorrow, commissioned and performed during MOMENTUM’s month-long performance series Works on Paper (2013).

Burn My Love, Burn, 2013

The work Burn My Love, Burn explores the body as the carrier of historical signature. By inscribing a poem on a shroud that once belonged to her recently passed grandmother – and then burning and consuming its remains – Hahn examines the relationship between text, memory making, and the human – particularly female – form. The work is composed of the remaining performance relics, video stills, and the video itself.

“The body does so by will, it inscribes, devours the story, becoming a container that vibrates and lives within a narrative. The shroud becomes the elementary signifier of such a historical narrative, it has been impregnated by the story, acts as the monument.

Through the burning, it can become part of an organic form in motion. The text conditions and creates the body within the very specifically hermetically sealed space.

The words activate the body’s field of memory as much as it creates a new one, adding on to the net of connotations the figure has toward words. The ritual becomes the form through which this transformation can be made, the body eats the body, destroys and paints again, another image. Again this is done by the word, it creates the flesh, gives it differentiating coloration, its plausible point of view. The body acts as a paper, it is inscribed by those murmurs of history, becoming a living artifact of its own history.

– Mariana Hahn
 

Live Performance by Mariana Hahn

An Interactive Performance with the Artist Reading an Oracle from Clarice Lispector’s Stream of Life ‘Aqua Viva’

i will read peoples oracle, share this with them in an intimate fashion.
i read the oracle from Clarice Lispectors stream of life, all my art works have their name from this book.
basically the names of the art works are the oracle reading of/for the art works.
this performance is about giving, sharing a moment with people.
its affirmative to life and open. how love should be.

– Mariana Hahn

Previously performed at Social Fabric, curated by David Elliott at Mill 6 Foundation, Hong Kong

MORE INFO ON SOCIAL FABRIC >>

JANET LAURENCE

Australian artist Janet Laurence‘s work explores a poetics of space and materiality through the creation of works that deal with our experiential and cultural relationship with the natural world. Her work echoes architecture while retaining organic qualities and a sense of instability and transience. It occupies the liminal zones and meeting places of art, science, imagination and memory. Laurence’s practice includes both ephemeral and permanent works as well as installations that extend from the museum/gallery into both urban and landscape domain. Her work, centered on living nature, bleeds between the architectural and the natural world, physically and metaphorically dissolving these boundaries. Her spaces are immersive and reflective, creating a play between perception and memory. Alchemical transformation, history and perception are underlying themes. Laurence’s work is represented in major Australian and international collections and has been included in many national survey exhibitions.

Grace, 2012

Donated by the artist to the MOMENTUM collection in 2013, “Grace” can be considered a meditation on the relation between energy sources and their visualization, the origins of material, ethics and interconnected, environmental networks.

This ecological crisis demands we shift our focus from a human-centred perspective to a broader multispecies, environmental approach, for how else are we to live ethically and find our place in this world. This is one of a series of videos made during my research in wildlife sanctuaries, using hidden cameras specialized for zoology research. In projection, the videos are are altered and slowed… I want to bring us into intimacy with these animals and to reveal our interconnection… I want to bring us into contact with the life-world. With a focus on the animals and their loss, I think about the loneliness of the last one of a species. What was their death? I wonder about their umwelt, the unique world in which each species lives. The bubble of sensation. This notion is powerfully articulated by the biologist Jacob von Uexküll, who has enabled rare insight into the worlds animals inhabit. An organism’s umwelt is the unique world in which each species live, the world as its body represents it, the world formed by the very form of the organism. It is a sensory world of space, time, objects and qualities that form perceptual signs for living creatures. I think it’s important to find this link in order to find compassion and care for developing a real relationship with other species we have to share the planet with.

– Janet Laurence

These are the days of violent extinctions, of global dimming and moving dust bowls, of habitat fragmentation, ice melt, and plundered lives. Animals are experiencing all this loss, and if we could better hear the waves of their agony, we would know this and be tormented. We would know that for the rest of our lives we will hear a growing chorus of increasingly diverse voices…

– Debbie Bird Rose

TRACEY MOFFATT

Tracey Moffatt is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists of international renown. Since her first solo exhibition in Sydney in 1989, she has had numerous exhibitions in major museums around the world. Working in photography, film and video, Moffatt first gained significant critical acclaim when her short film “Night Cries” was selected for official competition at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. Her first feature film, “Bedevil,” was also selected for Cannes in 1993. In 1997, she was invited to exhibit in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale, and a major exhibition of Moffatt’s work was held at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York in 1997/98, which consolidated her international reputation.

Having begun her career as an experimental filmmaker and as a producer of music videos, Moffatt eventually focused on filmmaking and cross-media practices after gaining acclaim as a photographer. Her investigation of power relations, which by the late 1990s often revolved around the relationship between Australian Aborigines and white colonial settlers, more recently engages contemporary media and the nature of celebrity. Known for her non-realist narratives reconstructed from pre-existing sources, Moffatt uses experimental cinema devices such as audio field recordings and low tones to provide playfully ironic commentary on the subjects of her found footage.

In the span of her 25 year career, Moffatt has held more than 100 solo exhibitions of her work in Europe, the United States and Australia, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Dia Center for the Arts, New York; the Hasselblad Centre in Goteburg, Sweden; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; and the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney. Tracey Moffatt was the recipient of the 2007 Infinity Award for art by the International Center of Photography, New York. In 2017, Tracey Moffatt will become the first indigenous artist to represent Australia in the Venice Biennale.

Other, 2009

As one of the founding collection donations following MOMENTUM’s first benefit exhibition, “Other” incorporates film techniques – splicing film clips, combining chronologies, creating and dissolving narratives – that parallel MOMENTUM’s questioning of time-based art.

“OTHER is a fast paced montage of film clips depicting attraction between races. Marlon Brando looks at Tahitian girls and Samantha from Sex and the City ogles an African American football player in the men’s locker room.
Seven minutes of gazing and touching and exploding volcanoes. Very funny, very hot.”

– Tracey Moffatt

MARIANA VASSILEVA

Mariana Vassileva was born in Bulgaria in 1964. Since graduating from the Universität der Künste in 2000, Vassileva continues to live and work in Berlin. Working across varied mediums such as video, sculpture, installation, and drawing, Vassileva’s practice is concerned with the poetry that lies beneath the quotidian and the routine. Based upon observation of daily life, her works respond to an element of playfulness inherent in artist and viewer alike. With the curious gaze of a voyeur or of an urban anthropologist, the artist observes people and their surroundings in order to capture a moment of poetic imagery. Watching, and the distance it implies, are both method and subject of a body of work reflecting on human concerns familiar to us all: communication, cultural displacement, relations with self and other, loneliness and the humor hidden within the rhythms of the day-to-day.As her artist’s statement asserts, she “transforms objects, situations and manners, and presents them in another reference on a lyrical level. … In this process, one is animated toward a heightened sensibility of daily variations.”

Morning Mood, 2010

Morning Mood (2010) was shot in the Sydney Botanical Gardens after Vassileva’s participation in the 17th Sydney Biennale, Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age (2010). The early morning routines of these bats as they resist the onset of the day and squabble with each other evoke the viewer’s potential for both differentiation and identification. Turning her camera to a creature perhaps more frequently associated with darker themes like blood and night, Vassileva captures the uncanny warmth of their morning moods. A single bat burrowing his face in his wings and reluctantly stretching his neck is eminently relatable, as are the sounds and rhythms of many bats gathering on the branches of a tree. As the three and a half minute long video loops over and over, we confront not just the strange humanity of these bats’ morning routine, but also perhaps the very animalistic qualities of our human routines. – Jenny Tang

The Color of the Wind, 2014

The Color of the Wind (2014) was made during Mariana Vassileva’s residency at the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA) in St. Petersburgh / Kronstadt, Russia, in March, 2014. In this video-performance, Vassileva con- joins the motif of a blank canvas and her own, human figure, traversing the urban and natural landscapes of Kronstadt – St. Petersburgh’s main sea- port and century-old army-town. As a historical site for political struggle, to which Kronstadt’s famous fortifications unrelentingly attest, we now won- der what it is that is being fought for in Vassileva’s act of silent protest. “Why did you not write anything on the banner?”, people on the street asked her. Be it an act of empathy and concern within the context of Russia’s current cultural climate of censorship and infringement of freedom of expression, or an invitation for people to consider for themselves what it is that should be written on it, Vassileva’s poetic visual language captivates the viewer, as we are addressed in a narrative mode, while never granting us the comfort to passively sit back and read.