Potentiality of Form

By Anna Krogh

The Finnish visual artist, Nanna Hänninen (b. 1973) works with a formal language that is strangely intangible. Her photographs set out from a material world with recognisable objects from everyday life: boxes, paper and stickers. Obviously ordinary, trivial things whose existence and poetic potential we typically overlook or take for granted. But not so in the case of Hänninen. Her eye for even the most insignificant and dispensable objects forms the basis of the visual universe that she explores with a visual sensibility and acute awareness.

It is an absolutely minimal universe that Hänninen puts forward. She makes use of very few props, indeed, to create her sparse and puritanical spaces. Her universe contains an element of fiction, since her seemingly real pictorial spaces, consisting of physical objects, do in fact appear quite unreal. The actual scales within her photographs remain vague and hard to define, making it difficult to orientate oneself within the pictorial space. The objects seem at once close by and far away. Her pictures suggest a grounding within reality, but appear at the same time to eschew it. There is, in other words, something ‘unheimlich’ about Hänninen’s ‘heimliche’ universe.

The pictures are saturated with a whiteness that Hänninen consistently and rigorously, barring a remarkably few number of exceptions, allows to permeate her photographs. Hänninen is seemingly never tempted to let colour play any role, but lets the white colour carry the mood of her ideas. Her works are aesthetically refined and delicate, cleared of noise and superfluous effects. She courageously focuses on what is simple and trivial and thus creates a radically minimalist aesthetics that, in her photographs, allows for inexhaustible investigation and exploration.

The photographic pictorial spaces defy any subjugation to form, and yet they are concerned with precisely that: giving form, defining form, and creating space around form. Hänninen’s visual move is characterised by simplicity and a repeated insistence on the possibility of objects to materialise and become form. The vague suggestions of emerging form are created by an almost monotonous, tedious slowness. The pictures are roaring with silence. But this is not to say that her pictures are boring. On the contrary. They constitute an invitation to explore the everyday spaces with a contemplative, or almost meditative, attunement, and the pictures are rich in discovery to those that have an eye for it. And so does Hänninen who, in her photographs, puts focus on a familiar world.

The photographic medium

Like many contemporary artists, Nanna Hänninen works primarily with photography. Since the 1980s, this medium has dominated contemporary avant-garde art, and it is particularly within photography that many innovations have occurred. The interest in the photographic medium should be seen in the light of the basic preoccupation within contemporary art, as regards how reality allows itself to be portrayed in art. How our existential experiences and insights may be translated and interpreted within an artistic visual universe. Traditionally, photography is perceived as a medium with a privileged relation to reality itself. Since its invention in the mid-1800s, visual art has used photography as a truthful ‘witness’ with respect to events and occurrences. Erroneously, one thought that photography was incapable of lying, twisting, or manipulating truth, but that it portrayed reality ‘as it appears’. However, it is obvious that photography remains an interpretation of what has been seen.

These in a sense diverging views of photography have formed the basis of contemporary use of the photographic image. On the one hand, the notion that reality may be captured on a sheet sensitive to light is accepted. But on the other hand, one has also come to realise that the discussion concerning the special relationship between photography and its representation of reality is only interesting to the extent that one acknowledges the immanent un-reality of photography. That photography, just like a painting, remains a subjective, constructed fragment whose statement is determined by the gaze behind the photographic lens.

Artists like Nanna Hänninen work with this paradox of photography in an attempt to ground and interpret an experience of reality within an artistic visual universe. Hänninen is preoccupied by the particular visuality and aesthetics of photography, but it is basically its relation to reality that seems to determine her choice of medium.

Material minimalism

In her work, Nanna Hänninen draws on a number of traditions. She is primarily inspired by photographers, but her ties to, for instance, minimalism of the 1960s is also evident. In her works 12 Boxes (2001) and Untitled #I (2002) she thus depicts simple geometrical shapes produced in the same material, and she works with shapes that appear in modules. Like the minimalists of the 1960s, she empties the object of content and presents it in its pure materiality. She does not seek to express her own temperament or emotional state. Her inspiration from minimalism is hence both conceptually and visually determined.

The choice of industrially manufactured modules is justified in terms of their visuality and their self-referential quality. And they allow Hänninen to explore the pictorial space and its creation. Hänninen’s work is comprised by a fascinating paradox. On the one hand the object insists on being visible, conquering the photographic space, but on the other hand it also threatens to disappear, to dissolve within its own materiality. Despite the vaguely defined shadows, the form seems to float in a weightless space. But at the moment when the eye defines and recognises, for instance, the box or the paper, as in the work Potential Object I (2001) it is as if the work recedes backwards and appears as a geometrical, abstract pictorial surface. This also characterises the photographs Space I-VII from 2001-2003. Hänninen says of the photographs:

"Somehow I think that the photographs Space I-VII are more purely visual than anything else that I have done before. I have been photographing ‘fake’ landscapes (except Space I). They are spaces that are created from small items or paper. The photograph makes these items seem real. There is almost nothing political or social in these works."

The pure white paper sheets are not at first easy to discern. The visual space is only slowly established. At a distance, one initially senses a horizon, seemingly consisting of a cloud or a mountain top. As one draws nearer, the structure of the paper appears to stand forth. The paper is placed in the foreground of the picture and seems almost tangibly present at the surface. The minimal space is characterised by a sensuousness that is created despite the coolness of the white colour. There is no discouraging distance between work and viewer. Hänninen succeeds in transforming the at times impersonal expression of minimalism into a highly subtle, intense, and above all physically present universe that occasionally allows a gesturing towards a figurative visual space.

Me as Hero (2002) and Memory Low (2003) are instances of how language interferes with the visual experience and adds to the work a significance by way of content, a long way from the classical minimalist stance. She has photographed a text that remains illegible in all of the works. With the text, the paper is disclosed in its materiality. The titles of the works are both carriers of content, but also contribute to the absurd statement of the work. With a good deal of (self)irony, they may suggest a title of the illegible text while the content remains utterly meaningless. Paradox of Secret Manifest (2001) is so far the most minimalist work by the artist.

"You can hardly see anything in the picture… it seems as if the object, the paper, is actually there behind the acrylic glass. But it is a photograph. I think that this work is the most conceptual and minimal that I have done."

The work draws on the white monochromes of the Russian avant-garde artist Kasimir Malevich. Just like Malevich, Hänninen is preoccupied by the white colour and by the materiality and structure hiding behind this coloured nothingness. But with this work she also touches the immanent discussion of art and photography regarding the object and its representation. As she says herself, the paper is so markedly present on the surface that one is led to believe that it physically is a paper sheet and not its representation. The idea of an empty space is here formulated in its most extreme and conceptual statement without Hänninen letting go of the materiality of the object and its ability to give form to the visual pictorial space.

Although the conceptual starting point is the conceptually based universe of works within minimalism, the pure, white pictorial surfaces also contain an element of personal presence. As is often the case with Hänninen’s photographs, there is a reference in the title of the work that points beyond the narrowly defined pictorial space. Through the titles, she points towards an associative visual reading, where the arbitrary space of the paper sheet creates reference to a familiar object (as in the case of Airplane #1 and #2, both from 2003), thus breaking off from total abstraction.

The social dimension

One of the recurring problematics within the work of Nanna Hänninen concerns the relationship between the visual and the social. That is, the divide between being visually conscious about the basic formal elements of the picture, while these are simultaneously linked to an external concrete reality. One is prone to view Hänninen’s work as a purely formalist based photography, but it is not as simple as that. Her abstractions regarding the possibilities of form actually contain a distinct obligation towards the social reality of which Hänninen is a part.

"Instead of order, I started to see chaos in things. I have been trying to catch the idea of society which is filing, sorting and systemizing things to be more secure and organized. I see a great paradox because setting up security measures you cause insecurity of something unknown… this series (Fear and Security) is about the fear of losing control."

Hänninen’s understanding of the psychological and mental mechanisms of society are the starting point of the series Fear and Security as well as a number of other works including Evenly divided chaos I and Keep Under Control I (2001) (Fear and Security). The titles of these works are carrying sense. They are not just descriptive, but contain references to the artistic intention. And as they suggest, the works are about security (and the fear of losing it), control and chaos.

One should hence not be mistaken about the poetic and sensuous portrayal of the trivial object. As the quote indicates, there is, beneath her formal investigations, a distinct social awareness and a desire to commit her art to social problematics. Her orderly and systematic compositions are to her a commentary on the attempt by society to structure, organise, and create a safety-net against chaos. Her starting point may well be the formal investigations of the genesis of the picture and the emergence of form, but as a visual artist she links her output to considerations regarding post-industrial society.

The series Fear and Security consists of ten pictures of trivial elements that seem so fragile that the slightest movement would dissolve the form and make the space collapse. In Fear and Security II (2001) bare, white paper sheets are spread out in a seemingly arbitrary system. They have an almost monumental character that contributes to making the photographic space concrete. This is not the case in Fear and Security V (2001), where stacked envelopes appear almost flat, because the surrounding space is not even vaguely defined. The last two pictures in the series are distinguished by the paper being only indirectly present. Just the contours of the sheets are visible on account of to the sand comprising the edge of the absent paper sheet. These pictorial universes are constantly hovering between being on the one hand well ordered, structured, and controlled, while on the other hand sustaining the ever-present risk that the system will collapse.

Hänninen speaks of the fear of losing control, and it is precisely this that the pictorial composition makes concrete. The pictorial elements appear as transient moorings within an abstract universe, and this contributes to the pictures containing an element of something unknown and uncontrollable. Her works are thus both a commentary on the rational, functional society and at the same time a visualisation of the fundamental fear of anarchy within the system. One could hardly term political this reference to a reality outside of the picture, but with her visually seductive works and with her choice of title, one senses, despite the abstract and construed suggestions, a distinct awareness of, and an artistic reflection on, the reality lying at the base of the photographs.

Signs of the time

Nanna Hänninen’s work is situated within a period when the experience of the divine was replaced by the private and the intimate. Since the 1990s, a substantial part of contemporary art has been characterised by a definite focus on the intimate and familiar. To a large number of young artists today, personal experience seems to be the only honest starting point for art. They convert their own experiences into valid visual insights regarding reality. Thus also for Hänninen who with her accounts of everyday trivialities creates new and surprising angles with respect to the intimate universe.

In Hänninen’s case, it is obviously not an instance of some kind of confessional art, where the artist divulges corporeal and emotional experiences onto the surface of the picture. Nor is it the private home of the artist that constitutes the pivotal point of her accounts of the trivial space of everyday living. Yet it seems natural to place her in this context, because her pictorial universe is very intimate and possesses an element of personal presence. The aesthetics of everyday living characterises Hänninen’s starting point, but she primarily uses it as a springboard for more formal investigations of the pictorial genesis itself.

Conceptual photography, as it was established by artists around the Düsseldorf School, remains to Hänninen the most significant point of reference. The idea of the pictorial space and about the potential of form is the driving force within her work. Structure, order, and systems characterise all of her photographs, but there is nothing cool and distanced about her poetic pictorial spaces. She takes reality at face value, but she adds to it an intimate nerve which situates her artistic expression at the interface between cool minimalism and the private sphere. The divisions between objectivity and subjectivity, rationality and irrationality, are tensions within Hänninen’s work that are hard to define unequivocally. Her pictures all contain an element of paradoxical contradictions, but the boundaries are blurred and one is left with an open visual field that creates space for aesthetic experiences and considerations regarding the artistic expressive potential of form and reality.

Anna Krogh is a curator at the Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, Denmark.
The quotes are from conversations with the artist and from her personal statements.

Excerpt from the article Potentiality of Form - An introduction to the Work of Nanna Hänninen
"FEAR and SECURITY", Forlaget Bjerggaard, Denmark 2003