Update
Sigune Hamann - TrAIN Artist-in-Residence at the Kunstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral
Artist Sigune Hamann has now completed a new set of work researched and developed as TrAIN Artist-in-Residence at the Kunstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, Bad Ems, Germany.
Hamann was born in Frankfurt am Main and studied in Berlin before moving permanently to the UK in 1990. One of the aims of her residency was to explore the contradictory mix of familiarity and strangeness that now characterises her relationship to Germany. The resulting project is made up of three elements; each of these – in common with other work by the artist – explores the space between the still and the moving image.
Her photographs of the river Lahn capture reflections on the surface of the water, with buildings, landscapes and sky presented as upside-down mirror images. The movement of the water creates distortions and abstractions. These images are at once, Hamann notes, “photographic, realistic and - even though they are not digitally manipulated - distorted. They “make visible something that is there but is not normally recognised“
A series of photographs and videos was produced from the vantage points provided by the many tourist boats that traverse the middle Rhine Valley. As a passenger, Hamann recorded the panning movement of the passing landscape. In the resulting videoloops, the picturesque landscape is remisnicent of a 19th century diorama; it appears as if being pulled mechnically behind a group of camera equipped tourists.
Since 1999 Hamann has developed the process and concept of taking photographic film-strips in an attempt to capture the dynamics of environments and their changes in time. A whole roll of film is exposed in a photographic camera in one continuous rewinding movement. This action captures the trajectories of bodies, objects and lights in motion, to produce an expansive image. In Bad Ems she used this technique to record the movement of the cable trains going up and down the mountains, as reflected in the dynamic view of the forest landscape from each train. The resulting images are complete film-strips that resemble forest panoramas.
A selection of these works was exhibited at the Kunstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral in November 2007. Sigune Hamann is now preparing for a solo exhibition at the Gallery of Photography, Dublin (March 2008).
A biography of Sigune Hamann is in the TrAIN Directory.
Tuesday 15 January, 2008
