ABOUT

Katrin Hahner is an interdisciplinary artist who works in the fields of music, visual arts and performance. She works with different materials, sometimes tangible like clay or wood, sometimes with words, space and sound.

She has a degree in stage acting and theatre, received a master of fine arts from Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart and took 2 years of post graduate studies at Kunsthochschule Weissensee.

Her four releases of original music have been featured in The Guardian, Rolling Stone, BBC, Kulturspiegel, Süddeutsche Zeitung and her projects and collaborations have been funded or co-funded by Pact Zollverein, Mondriaan Funds, Initiative Musik, Goethe Institut, Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa Berlin, Musikfonds, Tanzpakt and Musicboard Berlin.

She is a member of „Quest“ and „A_Collective_I“, two international artistic research groups in which she, together with visual artist Rosie Heinrich (NL), author Daisy Hildyard (UK), architect and author Sepideh Karami (UK), performance artists Eva Meyer Keller (GER) and Agata Siniarska (POL) explore new collaborative and collective practices through language, ritual and process based inquiry.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am a visual and sonic art-maker and most of my artistic and creative work is built on mnemonics or tracing the memory of a landscape, since nature is in fact my biggest source of inspiration.

I sculpt with different materials, sometimes tangible like clay or wood, sometimes with words, space and sound. I am interested in the process of mythmaking and how objects attain sacred properties. I investigate the influence of time, material, outer influence, geometry, weather, space, location and planetary constellation. In time based rituals I place handmade objects in designated spots in nature, exposing them to exceptional natural occurrences like the period of midnight sun in the northern hemisphere. The objects are talked to, sung to, listened to and carried around over longer periods of time.

I draw from my research in theology, mysticism, ethnomusicology, sociology and ethnography. My recent sonic release „White Fire“ has been informed by the process of incineration in ancient medicine making. Through firing and incineration toxic plant or animal components lose their toxicity and develop healing properties. Art-making is also a process of rearranging. Thinking, seeing and feeling patterns are transformed and new properties are uncovered.