VANITAS VANITATUM
What is this world, and who are we in it?
How much did it change us, while we found where we fit?
The shapes of us, hiding in the waters of our minds.
As time dissolves them right before our eyes.
In “VANITAS VANITATUM” her first solo-exhibition in Japan, Austrian artist Kathrin Hanga explores the impermanent nature of a fundamental aspect of our existence. Our memories make up the core of how we see ourselves. And this core, the ego, certainly feels very solid. But how much of our identity is a product of the world, not of ourselves? And what will remain once our memories fade away?
Exhibition held at Gallery Ether, Tokyo, JP
30.11.-21.12.2024
The series of self-portraits explore the self, the unconscious and its relationship to the material world. The photographs stage an encounter between the body and an object, generated by the method of superimposing analogue photographs. An act that places both in a spatial and textual relationship with each other. Hanga’s photographs offer a glimpse into uncanny worlds that mirror back our anxieties and unconscious desires. The subject-object relation is skewed and scrutinized, questioning the frameworks that we have built our world around – revealing their inherent instability, being nothing but a construct.
