Nanna Hänninen

Nanna Hänninen - Main Road in E 75 in Lapland

Artist Biography: It might be surprising to call Nanna Hänninen's (Rovaniemi, Finland, 1973) works landscapes. They are photographs that, in Nanna's own words, "draw the movements of my body merging with the landscape". In this way, the human presence becomes explicit and transforms the scenery in a decisive way, turning it into something abstract yet more manageable. Light and long exposures configure a language with a syntax that speaks of the individual immersed in his external environment and his control over it or lack of control. Nanna creates musical scores punctuated by her heartbeat, her movements and her laughter, all vital experiences in a real world that amplifies their sounds like a percussion box. The boundaries between the individual and the universal are blurred by an artifact, the camera, which acts as a unifying prosthesis of subject and object, self and other. Nanna ultimately dares to challenge the paradigm of photography and its canonical representation of reality. In her most recent projects Nanna unifies photography and painting through the figurative and the abstract respectively, this conceptual approach being one of her most original features. The concern about the environmental situation facing our society today, or the conflicts between couples are the background of the ideas developed by the artist, not only from a social point of view but also from a political one. The pieces depicting people are a symbol of our individual alienation and our connection -perhaps lost- with nature and time.