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.
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long-term art projects
2005–12 senior street art
In this the participative art project, Stephanie developed and facilitated workshops and participative actions around Graffiti, Street Art and Hip Hop for people older than 50 years, upon invitation of 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. International media coverage 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, Seniorenratgeber / Apothekenrundschau, a French schoolbook to learn the German language (Edition Nathan), and many more.
The project was made possible through various funding and commissions, amongst others on an ongoing base by the Communal District of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg of Berlin (2006-11). It was nominated for the “art.award” by “dieGesellschafter” (Aktion Mensch) in 2007.
2013-2015 The Wise and the Ways
Audio recordings of advice for a good life, collected in the streets of Berlin – Neukölln, Wedding and Marzahn, and in Görlitz. Shown in Haus am Kleistpark (collective / Tempelhofer Kunstpreis 2016), Zukunftsvisionen Festival Görlitz (2015, site-specific installation), Galerie M (Temporäre Kunstprojekte Marzahner Promenade, 2014), OKK (2013) and Labor: Urbanes Altern /48 Stunden Neukölln (2013 in a site-specific installation at Donau Ecke Ganghofer), and online (see title link).
The project was made possible through commissions and a residency in the “Art Lab” by Zukunftsvisionen Festival in Görlitz. It was nominated for the “Tempelhofer Kunstpreis” by Haus am Kleistpark, a communal gallery in Berlin Schöneberg in 2016.
2011-18 Donau Ecke Ganghofer
In a 80+ square meter window space of a running department store in Berlin – Neukölln, Stephanie realized unannounced performances and shifting installations, continuously in flux and strictly non-commercial, with every working stage equally visible for a broad audience of passer-bys, and poly-perspectives of art unfolding when walking by the see-through corner.
Next to developing her own practice site- and situation-specifically in several half-year long series of shiftings and other performative experimentation, she invited international visual and performing artists to develop and exhibit works in that corner window, with the soft curatorial proposal of shiftings and transitionings.
This work was awarded the “Inclusion Prize” by Kulturnetzwerk Neukölln in 2013 and the “Project Space Prize” by the Berlin Senate in 2017.
2017 ongoing depowering explorations / embodied thinking research