Adad Hannah: Glints and Reflections

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Adad Hannah, "Unwrapping Rodin 6, colour photograph, " 2010

courtesy of Musée d’art de Joliette

Adad Hannah endeavours to re-establish museums and galleries through a new lens, in today’s context. To achieve this, he uses mirrors as rear-view mirrors in the rooms of museums and galleries, swapping the conventional presentation of objects with unexpected and reversed views. His many projects reflect on art, our perceptions of the works themselves, and the places that house them.    

Time occupies a prominent place in Hannah’s work, forged by a lasting interest in temporality and its complex relationship with photography and video. This is supplemented by a constant desire to diversify the means of animating the fixed image, usually beginning with a filmed pose that is held momentarily by the protagonists’ vacillating bodies.

Hannah’s work is punctuated by notions of seriality, repetition, recovery, duplication, reflection, and visual citation. Although these ideas are recurrent in his work, Hannah avoids redundancy by creating images that are distinct in their content, though related formally and conceptually. This is why the order of the works presented in the gallery does not follow the chronological order of their production. Instead, it runs back and forth among the themes of his artistic practice: Mirroring the Museum, Reflections of Artworks, and Lives Captured.

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 lives and works in Vancouver and exhibits his work nationally and internationally. This exhibition brings together key works made by Hannah in the past decade that focus on his enduring interest in the photographic image in relation to personal and social histories.

Initiated and circulated by the Musée d'art de Joliette. Curated by Lynn Bannon and Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre.