Adad Hannah

Portrait of a Gentleman (Museum Still 5), video installation

Nagrada Bogdanka Poznanović

This work traverses various layers in our perception of mediated time and space and creates powerful and joyful visual experience using performance art and photography like video recording. (Jury members Piotr Krajewski and Zoran Naskovski).

Adad Hannah’s Stills are a combination of performance art, video art and photography. The image moves, but, from beginning to end, shows the performers carrying out one single frozen action. Hannah calls them long exposure videos, with the takes lasting between five and fifteen minutes, and being shown in real time without sound or editing. They are reminiscent of tableaux vivants, a popular nineteenth-century form of art in which groups of actors represented (mostly) paintings before an audience. These tableaux owed their effect particularly to the possibility of reinforcing the conveyance of the image by combining greater physical presence with time for contemplation within a theatrical setting.