Alexander Hahn (artist)
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Alexander Hahn (born 1954) is an artist working with electronic media. An innovator in his field, he addresses the electronic image as a technological metaphor for perception, memory and dream: signals oscillate between lighting up and blanking out, between sensory presence, mental apparition and oblivion. At the center of his artistic practice is everyday life—the seemingly ordinary. From daily video recordings, accidental, deliberate, or captured unnoticed—works emerge that are processed and transformed on the computer into a wide range of forms: long- and short-form videos, installations, computer images and prints, animations, virtual reality, AI-based image worlds, and prose texts.[1] The personal connects with the universal, weaving imagination, memory, and dream together with art, science, and history. Out of incidental yet singular acts arise precise, poetic reflections on perception, memory, forgetting, dream, and the ways we narrate ourselves. As art historian Dominique Radrizzani writes in the catalog Astral Memories of a Flying Man: "It is this luminous realm of dream that Hahn’s great art of light and shadow rediscovers, using video like those infinite eyes which night has opened in us (Novalis) ... The terrains explored by Hahn are not those of the terrestrial globe anymore, but rather those of the ocular globe, the inward looking hemisphere of the eye."[2]
Hahn was born in Zürich and grew up in Rapperswil-Jona, Switzerland. Introduced to computers while at the gymnasium Kantonsschule Zürcher Oberland in Wetzikon (1966–1973), he created a game of snakes and ladders in the APL (programming language). During his studies in Visual arts education at the Zurich University of the Arts (Bachelor in 1979), he made his first videos and Super8 films, e.g. Flight and Glass (1976) [3] or the Mockumentary Demis (1977) about the singer Demis Roussos. In 1981, he moved to New York and participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (ISP).
In 1990, he spent nine months in Rome as a fellow of the Istituto Svizzero. Between 1991 and 1994, he lived in Berlin, first as a fellow of the DAAD, the German Academic Exchange Service, then as Artist-in-residence at ART+COM. From 1995 to 1997, he lived in Warsaw.[4]
