ARTIST STATEMENT

The subject of my art is the everyday. Sourced from my daily accidental video recordings, processed and transformed in the computer, I create works that span video, installation, computer graphics and print, animation, virtual reality, and writing. They combine the personal with the universal, merging imagination, memory, and dream with motifs of science and history. Rooted in the belief in the transformative power of media, they turn ordinary experiences into profound reflections on human existence.

BIOGRAPHY

Alexander Hahn (b. 1954, Rapperswil, Switzerland) has worked in the electronic and digital media arts in Europe and America since the mid 1970s, integrating the time-based forms of video with practices of computer imagery and print, animation, virtual reality, installation, and writing. A graduate of the Zurich University of Arts with a degree in art education (1979), he participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York (1981). He lives and works in New York.

The recipient of numerous honors and awards, Hahn's work has been exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions and film festivals from New York to Zurich, Sydney to Berlin, Beijing to New Delhi. He's had major retrospectives at the Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Switzerland, Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria, and the Padiglione d'Arte Moderna, Ferrara, Italy. In 2023, the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland, presented an extensive survey of his work, entitled Memory of Light - Light of Memory.

In addition to reviews in ZKM Mediagramm, Art Papers, Radio WBAI, NY, Huffington Post, Il Manifesto, Basler Zeitung, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Berliner Zeitung, Kunstbulletin and others, various monographs have been published, most notably Alexander Hahn - Works 1976-2007, Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg/DE (2007) and Astral Memories of a Flying Man, Musée Jenisch, Vevey/CH (2002). 

There are two documentaries about his work:  3 Approaches by Matthias Behrens (1994) and Words of Artists/Portraits of Artists by Catherine Gfeller (2012)