Adad Hannah Three Generations (Kodiak Art Club, 1953)
In this new body of work, Hannah shifts focus to his personal history, re-animating a “frozen moment” captured 18 years before he was born. His starting point is a yellowing photograph of his grandmother painting a portrait of his mother at an art club on an American military base in Kodiak, Alaska in 1953. Hannah works in dialogue with his mother, the subject of the original photograph and an artist herself, collaborating to expand the moment under observation through a complex video and still installation. Integrating a mock-up of the studio setting in the original photograph and other findings from the family archive, Hannah breathes new life into the found image. Positioning for the first time a family member as collaborator rather than as subject or model, Hannah pushes his practice deeper into the exploration of the most popular genre of photography—the family snapshot
Curated by Mona Filip