Nanna Hänninen New Landscapes

Nanna Hänninen (Rovaniemi, Finland, 1973) is currently one of the most widely acclaimed emerging European artists. Despite her youth, her extensive curriculum, including exhibitions and work placed in both private and public collections, demonstrates her talent. Curators of the standing of Roger Gustafsson and Johan Sjostrom have praised this artist's work. Hänninen was trained at the Helsinki School, which is the world's most influential photography school owing to the quality of its docents, the talent of its students, its innovative methods and its international relevance.

It might be surprising that Nanna Hänninen's minimalist and abstract works should be called landscapes. They are photographs that, in Hänninen's own words, "depict the movements of my body blending into the landscape". In this way, the human presence is made explicit and transforms the setting in a decisive way, converting it into something abstract, yet more manageable. The lighting and long exposures shape a language with a syntax that speaks of the individual submerged in her exterior environment, and of her control or lack of control over it.

"My New Landscapes are located in famous cities and buildings, factories, cemeteries, airports, or towers, strategically important places where you find yourself in a setting with a mixture of lights that, when photographed with long exposures, almost become short films."

Hänninen creates musical scores punctuated by the beating of her heart, her movements and her laughter, all of which are life experiences in a real world whose sounds are amplified as in a percussion box. The borders between the individual and the universal are dissolved by an artefact, the photographic camera, which acts as a unifying prosthesis of the subject and the object, the self and the other. In short, Hänninen dares to challenge the paradigm of photography and its canonical representation of reality.

Hänninen has had solo shows in Paris, Berlin, Zürich, Copenhagen, Cologne and Helsinki. Her work has been acquired for collections all over the world, including Switzerland, The United States, Spain, Germany, Italy and The United Kingdom.

Nanna Hänninen
"New Landscapes"