Nanna Hänninen


Nanna Hänninen is a photographic artist who has worked as a professional since 1998. She lives and works in Kuopio, Finland.

Education

Hänninen has studied at Lahti Institute of Design in Finland in 1994-1998 and Hochscule für Kunst und Gestaltung in Zürich in 1997–1998. She became Master of Arts from University of Art and Design in Helsinki in 2002. She is part of The Helsinki School.

Style and work

Hänninen's works has been shown in several solo and group exhibitions. Many of her works are placed of national and international public collections as well as private ones. Hänninen has made two commissioned public artworks. Walks from Dusk till Dawn to Centralposthus Blåmannen in Stockholm, Sweden and Jungle and Powerplant of Kuopio: version in Red to Kuopio employment agency in Kuopio, State Art Collections, Finland. She has published also two artist monographs: Fear and Security and Recordings.
Mental and social structures as well as experiencing the culture are the basic themes of Hänninen's work. Her interest in photography is the tension between rational and irrational subjects and ideas or reality and fiction, which is given by photography itself. Even if some images and themes seem unreal or chosen randomly the photograph makes to keep relationships with the reality.

Series

Fear and security

Fear and Security tells about the fear of losing control. When photographing more objects, instead of order, she started to see the idea of chaos in things. That became a series of pictures called Fear and Security. Hänninen says that "There is a great paradox because by setting up security measures you cause insecurity of something". In these images Hänninen has been trying to catch the idea of the society, which is filing, sorting and systemizing things to be more secure and organized. "Her work titles- Fear and Security, Keep Under Control, Information Failure- reinforce the idea that these stage-set-like, micro-theatrical scenes are visualized thought, visual aphorisms, emblematic abstractions. In a model-like manner they represent thoughts about the world, about tensions, opposition, overload, sources of error."
Psychological and mental mechanisms of the society as well as the 9/11 incident in New York City are the starting point of the series. The theme is still very current. Aesthetically these works are very simple and silent, even minimalistic.

The New Landscapes

In the series New Landscapes the photographs are taken from famous metropolises, buildings, factories, cemeteries, airports, towers - mostly strategically important places involving a mixture of lights in the scenery and a long exposure so that they become almost like short movies. These urban landscapes are basically drawings of body movements that can be seen on photographic material as rhythmical light lines where subject and the scenery melt into a single image. Pictorial motifs are divided into different surfaces; the abstraction and pictorial surface, into the human presence and into the photography as media which in this case is moving closer a painting. The subject is still strongly presented, whereas the object - the scenery- is estranged and thus becomes easier to deal with. The works are often named geographically: Basel, New York's Brooklyn Bridge, the airport of Ponta Delgata, the port of Helsinki, the A5 autobahn.
The New Landscapes follows Hänninen's sociological interest towards individual who is sensing, understanding and placing herself in the outside world. The figurative language; minimalism and the reduction of information is more a visual method, which have references to symbolic or linguistic meanings but also it can be seen as an art historical references to modernist painting. As a result of all these pictures become concentrated narrations of recognition and moment as well as large colour abstractions that have profound significance of the surrounding reality. "Nanna Hänninen documents with seismographic precision, the interplay between the movements of the real world before her eyes and her own world, her movements, her breathing and laughter, her hesitation. What we find here are highly abstract photographs with semi-translucent, intangible backgrounds and sketchy undulating movements, with lines contracting, expanding and entangling, with fields and clusters of color." The photographs have been re-worked by computer.

Asymmetric Exposure

Asymmetric Exposures is Hänninen's series about her admiration of the skyscraper's as well as understanding of the fragility of those and common peace agreements in the society. The incident in New York on 9/11 is still influencing her work and this that can be seen in all her works through 2000-2009 either with direct research of it or by denial. Nanna Hänninen is not only documenting the world as it is but also transforming the truth. "Nanna Hänninen incorporates her own emotions and ideas about the Twin Towers attack in her interpretation of this milestone in modern history. The skyscraper thus becomes an image of the fragility of our civilisation and its fundamental lack of stability." She is stretching out the way of seeing and viewing things while having joy of playing with the exposure, time and light itself- the basic fundaments of photography. Nanna Hänninen also sees a reference to patterns and ornaments used in islamic art where "figurative" pictures are not allowed.
Asymmetric Exposures brought Hänninen also to geometrical forms like the Platonic solids and especially the fifth- dodecahedron, which she saw through her newest photographs and as result of this she then for the first time made three-dimensional objects containing photographs in the form of dodecahedron.

Plants / objects // paint

Plants/Objects//Paint is the most recent series about artificiality, alienation and reality. The new group of works unifies photography and painting, questioning authenticity and imitation of life through this process. Plants are photographed in color, transformed into black and white images, then painted over in their original colors and once more photographed. Nanna's approach is very conceptual and abstract. 'I am not a painter but a photographer. Though in the first place I am a visual artist.', she says. She adds color artificially to the pictures, covering or emphasizing parts that are most important. The color, which was the original and true element, is recreated. Abstract elements such as life and reality often intertwine and overlap similar because of the endless change of time. It is the alienation of the nature itself and its circulation that affects her work.

Exhibitions

Solo (selected)

At public collections in Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, EMMA Espoo Museum of Modern Art/ Saastamoinen Art Foundation, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Maison Europèenne de la Photographie, Kuopio Art museum, State Art Collections, Swedish National Public Art Council, European Patent Office, Ostsee Sparkasse Rostock and at private collections in Berlin, Brussels, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Geneva, Helsinki, Köln, London, Luxemburg, Miami, Munich, New York, Oslo, Paris, Turin, Trento, Zurich.