ABOUT
Katrin Hahner is an interdisciplinary artist who works in the fields of music, visual arts and performance. She works with different materials, sometimes tangible like clay or wood, sometimes with words, space and sound.
Her education includes a Master of Fine Arts from Staatliche Akademie der Künste, a diploma in stage acting and theatre studies and 2 years of postgraduate studies at Fine Art Department of Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee.
Her projects and collaborations have been funded or co-funded by Pact Zollverein, Mondriaan Funds, Initiative Musik, Goethe Institut, Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa Berlin, Musikfonds, Tanzpakt and Musicboard Berlin and she has exhibited and performed in many places such as Sophiensäle Berlin, Modern Teater Stockhom, Akureyri Art Museum, Staatstheater Kassel, Borgarlekihus Reykjavik and others.
Her four releases of original music have been featured in The Guardian, Rolling Stone, BBC, Kulturspiegel, Süddeutsche Zeitung and she frequently collaborates with artists of all fields.
Currently a member of PRATT NY Mindfulness Collaboratory, she researches the connection between mindfulness practices and innovation. She is also a member of „Quest“ and „A_Collective_I“, two international artistic research groups in which she, together with visual artist Rosie Heinrich (NL), author Daisy Hildyard (UK), architect and author Sepideh Karami (UK), performance artists Eva Meyer Keller (GER) and Agata Siniarska (POL) explore new collaborative and collective practices through language, ritual and process based inquiry.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am a visual and sonic art-maker and most of my artistic and creative work is built on mnemonics or tracing the memory of a landscape, since nature is in fact my biggest source of inspiration. I am interested in communication strategies that include the unseen and the wordless.
I sculpt with different materials, sometimes tangible like clay or wood, sometimes with words, space and sound. I am interested in the process of mythmaking and how objects attain sacred properties. In time based rituals I place handmade objects in designated spots in nature, exposing them to exceptional natural occurrences like the period of midnight sun in the northern hemisphere. The objects are talked to, sung to, listened to and carried around over longer periods of time. I later place these objects in the hands of participants and together we try to understand the connection of listening, time, song and sound within our communication with all of the natural world.
I draw from my research in theology, mysticism, ethnomusicology, sociology and ethnography. To me, art-making is a process of revealing patterns and rearranging them in order to gain a fleeting understanding of the world that surrounds me and becoming a part of it.
Portrait: Tabea Magdalena Martin