The exhibition focuses on the continuously shifting perspectives in the work of Heike Hanada, between artistic intervention on the one hand, and architectural reality on the other, such as the Bauhaus Museum she recently designed in Weimar. Archetypal monumentality and spatial dissolution confront one another in different perspectives, sometimes contradictory, sometimes divergent. Various media engage in a dialogue, in which the built and the unbuilt converge in a kind of metamorphosis. For example, photographic snapshots are presented in which austere architectural motifs dissolve into the surreal or picturesque. The resulting narrative moments reflect Hanada’s artistic investigations, which concentrate on the “improper qualities” of emptiness, material, and space.
The exhibition includes multiples of drawings and objects, and digital stills from a video projection from the architect’s studio, and is complemented by photographs taken by Andrew Alberts. Together they offer a kind of bricolage, comparable to the intermediate state of a laboratory.
Heike Hanada founded her office hh_laboratory for art and architecture in 2007 in Berlin. Her new building for the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar opened this April. Since 2018, she has been Professor of Building Typologies at the Technical University of Dortmund.