STAGES — Hanna Besenhard 

The recurring format of STAGES is as radical as it is simple: young artists from Graz and Styria are offered a stage for the duration of an evening – or ocasionally longer. HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark thus serves as a platform for up-coming artists from the immediate vicinity to make their work accessible to a wider audience.

Hanna Besenhard works with video, sound, sculpture, objects and documents as well as stamp cards or forged driver’s licenses, often combining several media. The focus is on time-based media apparatuses, their technological foundations and histories, as well as their representative and temporal dynamics. A recurring element in her work is the combination of classic organic materials such as marble, felt or animal skins with digital printing processes and video. She is not primarily concerned with the clash between these materials or with highlighting a contrast, but rather with condensing a larger narrative into a story. This is also Besenhard’s connection to the two exhibitions by Caroline Mesquita and Leon Höllhumer, which are currently on view at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark.

Exhibition Page​

For her interpretation of the STAGES format, Besenhard uses the title of the series as a starting point and develops an installation of stage elements that give space to existing works, while integrating a new video work. A single wedge of white Thassos marble tilts the stack of stage elements slightly upwards on one side. The concept of a stage and its distant history as a reference for time-based languages becomes an object. The tilted stack makes use of the nature of sequential media without a conventional temporal flow. The accompanying video work features two projectors, presented both as objects in themselves and as tools of representation. Together they form a rhythmic framework that arises from the transfer of analog derivatives to digital ones: an image of ab analogue projector is projected with a digital projector via a digital recording.