[Fall 2023]

Posing Bodies and Works
Sylvain Campeau

[Excerpt]

At Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain,¹ Adad Hannah recently presented a panorama combining new works, in the first gallery, with others still underway, in the second gallery. Hence the logic of grouping them under the title Recent Exposures. There is in allusion here to one of Hannah’s favourite effects: the immobility required of his models in his video works. The exhibition provided an opportunity to probe his unique aesthetic more deeply.

The preamble was Saskatoon Guernica, to which Backyard Guernica (Georgia) responds, in a way, as both draw on the same source. The first work was a commission for the exhibition Guernica Remastered, presented at the Remai Modern, a Saskatoon museum. Hannah chose to reconstruct, in more than respectable dimensions, Picasso’s landmark work denouncing the barbarous bombardment of the Basque town of Gernika-Lumo, using common materials – objects from everyday life. Before it existed in photographic form, the piece was shown as an installation at the museum, revealing its preparatory phase. This is how Hannah does things: works exist in different forms, in different variants of themselves, replayed as diverse re-sayings and re-mediations or in preparatory versions. For him, it’s as if a work has to be understood within a sort of network that spreads from work in progress to presentation. Testifying eloquently to this idea are his pieces showing people interacting with the works in museums. Inevitably situated between a doing and an exhibiting, the piece that he creates makes it possible to explore the trajectory that led it through this network…

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES ]