Stephanie Hanna is a socially engaged artist based and born in Berlin. She works process-oriented and situation-specific in diverse media, such as audio, video and performance, as well as spatial and shifting installations of found and collected objects. Stephanie often invites the participation of a counterpart into the process of making new works, thus opening up to plurifold perspectives.
Her current artistic research on embodied thinking processes has been unfolding since her reflective writing about her artistic approaches as a practiced critique of existing power relations in “a depowerment manifesto. artistic attitudes and practices to fairly rebalance the world” (2017). Since then, Stephanie has been exploring bodily experiential ways, attitudes, and means to bring stuck ideas back into motion and power relations into balance.
Through her works, Stephanie not only reflects on her own cognitive experience of the world. She practically questions the self-evidence of unconscious social habits, thus trying to bring unbalanced power relations, as well as social marginalization and exclusion to awareness of those involved while also trying to figure out, where and how perceptual structures can offer space for development and change.
Stephanie studied stage and costume design at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee and at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht in the Netherlands (BA 2001) and completed the M.A. “Art in Context” at the Universität der Künste Berlin (2006). From 2020-22, she completed a training in somatic movement therapy as a deepening of her experimental and artistic embodied research.
previous long-term art projects
2005 – 2012 developing the participative art project senior street art:
Facilitating workshops and participative actions around graffiti and street art for people above 50 years, taking place at institutions such as Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Autostadt Wolfsburg, ibk kubia at Akademie Remscheid as well as in diverse cultural centers for senior citizen and (or!) youth in Kreuzberg. Media publications in Die Zeit, art – das Kunstmagazin, de:bug, 3Sat / ZDF Kultur, IlSole24Ori weekend edition, Spiegel Online – international edition, Hemispheres – Blog and In-Flight Magazine of United Airlines and many more.
2013-2015 The Wise and the Ways, audio collection of advice for a good life, collected in the streets of Berlin – Neukölln, Wedding and Marzahn, and in Görlitz. Possibly ongoing. Shown respectively installed site-specifically in Haus am Kleistpark (collective / Tempelhofer Kunstpreis 2016), Zukunftsvisionen Festival Görlitz (2015), Galerie M (Temporäre Kunstprojekte Marzahner Promenade, 2014), OKK (2013) and Labor: Urbanes Altern /48 Stunden Neukölln (2013).
From 2011 until 2018, Stephanie realized unannounced performances and shifting installations in a 80+ square meter department store window at the street corner Donau Ecke Ganghofer in Berlin, Neukölln. Every working stage and every artistic decision was immediately visible for passer-bys. Poly-perspectives were the everyday reality when walking by and looking through the corner.
Next to developing her own practice site- and situation-specifically in that space, she invited international visual and performing artists to develop and exhibit works in that corner window, offering her practical artistic views on the space, namely shiftings and transitionings, as a curatorial proposal.