Curtain Call: Hannah Bohnen

A little over five years ago, I moved into a studio in the Schöneberg district of Berlin, in the courtyard of a building on Kolonnenstraße scattered with birch trees, linden trees, and wild brambles.

Hannah Bohnen and I met in this studio one early spring morning. In my memory, the sun was timidly filtering through the opaque windows of Linus Rauch’s studio, coated with a thin layer of dust. The rays were dancing on the bricks of the old saddlery that served as our studio. We poured ourselves a cup of coffee and, after exchanging a few words, we climbed the ladder leading to my studio on the upper floor.

Hannah struck me as a bird. Light and agile, she moved through the space as if the floor were a surface of ice inviting her to spin and search for balance. We spoke about movement and dance. Hannah told me about her training as a dancer and her sudden stop at the age of fourteen. At that time, in the process of creating her works, she reconnected with the relationship to bodily movement and the discipline she had experienced as a child.

With our friendship sealed, we had many opportunities to collaborate. Interfaces, or those who caress the surface was the first exhibition I organized in which Hannah took part. The first works she showed me were wooden panels with a reflective, enamel-like surface. The surfaces were engraved using scans of her brother’s movements while playing the violin. This body of works would be featured in several concerts, where the panels and their surface movements were used to stage Philipp Bohnen’s recitals.

Hannah Bohnen also participated in both parts of the Off Water exhibition that we presented in Berlin and Paris on the theme of fluidity. For these two exhibitions, the artist displayed sculptures made of foam solidified with plaster. She structured the space with knots and draperies that extended and folded back on themselves. The works took on a final form that eluded categorization: soft in appearance, they invited the release of the body. Yet this plasticity concealed a solidity that had frozen the movement of the material. When we spoke about it together, Hannah emphasized the importance of the process of creating the work. It mattered just as much as the final form of the sculpture. Immersed in water, the material became heavy—very heavy—and Hannah lifted it, made it undulate, shaping it at arm’s length in a movement that engaged her entire body. The sculptures were like casts. They followed the shape of her body, extended it and mended it, fixing movement, cracking under the weight of labor until they arrived at a definitive form. Placed on the ground or suspended, they were the vestiges of the effort that pushed the limits of the material from which they were made. Recently, the artist adapted this method to the medium of porcelain. These new sculptures intensified the tension between visual softness, fragility, and solidity that characterized her work.

One morning last February, I visited Hannah in her new studio in Lichtenberg. She was working on a series of porcelain sculptures and experimenting with new movements on canvas. As she danced around her studio while telling me about her current research, we began a conversation about our changing, moving, strong and fragile, living bodies. I told her about Yvonne Rainer’s diary that I was reading, Feelings are facts, a life. Hannah Bohnen seek the breaking point of the materials she uses, just as the dancer pushes the limits of her body. The incessant and repeated practice of the same exercises is the sine qua non of any sporting practice, and the artist approaches art as she had practiced dance at a high level. The thesis she had presented for her final degree was on the subject of muscle memory. The artist’s muscles remember, and her entire body is reflected in the works that make up the exhibitions she scenographes.

For her upcoming exhibition, she created a setting composed of large-format steel panels which, like wings as she calls them, are guiding viewers through the gallery space. Thus, the contrast between the steel panels and the glass sculptures is as much resistance as it is tension resolved by their juxtaposition.

As I left the studio while it is snowing outside, I receive a message from Hannah with a quote from Samuel Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” I think about our relationship with endurance and repetition, every day, in the studio. I think about Hannah Bohnen’s works, which unfold with strength and perseverance in a slender movement until exhaustion. And I think about the resolution that plays out a few measures before the collapse, when the tension subsides, just before the curtain call.