Erka Shalari: You recently moved into a new studio, and it’s organized almost like a system: labelled, arranged, and archival. Is that order something you impose, or something you need?
Kathrin Hanga: I have a distinct desire for order. Maybe because, inwardly, things rarely feel so ordered — if there is order outside, I hope to feel some of it inside. It’s an illusion, but it helps. My studio serves the different processes of my work: photo studio, archive, laboratory, and gallery all at once. So, arranging it is a constant practice of managed chaos. Evolving it is a way to build a system I can work within and rediscover by rearranging it. Things are stored, labelled, sometimes almost too carefully.
That tension, building a system precisely to see it break, runs back a long way for you, into the theatre. Where did it begin?
This need to arrange, repeat, and return to certain forms runs through the work itself. In Fluids (2017) or Time of My Life (2021), it’s almost obsessive. But what interests me most is the moment the system breaks down. The analog photographic medium holds the same contradiction: the processes are exact, but there are too many variables to predict what will result from their execution.
It began in Vienna. The city always felt theatrical to me: beauty, history, social performance everywhere, but something essential was missing. I became fascinated by how people present themselves: not necessarily as something fake, but as something deeply human. We all play roles, and the roles reveal us. I kept watching people and wondering: are they feeling, or are they playing? And is there something in between?
How did you escape the play?
I left. First, I studied at the theater school École Jacques Lecoq in Paris. We worked abstractly, constructing forms, working with gesture, mask, rhythm, and the relation between body and space. Not psychological explanations, but physical intelligence. It shaped how I compose images and how I perform for them.
Theatre was the logical first step: a place to investigate that threshold through the body rather than explanation. Something can be completely constructed and still be expressive. A stage is artificial, but what happens on it is real.
My time in Japan also sharpened my interest in devotion versus dogma. It is a ritualistic society, built on centuries of rules and repetitions. This is very similar to Vienna, but they seem to find a meaning in their rituals that I felt was absent at home. They have an even more restrictive idea for how individuals should behave, yet they seem to be transformed by their devotion to rituals rather than limited by them. It was also in Japan that I found a comfortable language in Shintoism. In animism, objects aren’t inert but inhabited, alive. My own curiosity about the inner lives of ordinary things found a culture built on respecting and honouring those inner lives. So, my darkroom process developed into a liminal theater space where I sometimes stage rituals to reveal the inner lives of the objects and gestures I collect.
Your process is an amalgam of analogue techniques, of construction, yet you say that the final image is something where you don’t fully decide?
First, there’s fieldwork: wandering, collecting fragments: flea-market objects, family belongings, plants. These become raw material, and I capture them on film. I see them almost as an alphabet, and have developed a photographic archive of postures and remnants I use to write new stories. I work with photomontage, multiple exposure, and solarisation. Very complex, sometimes fragmented, processes that hold a beautiful contradiction between precision and accident. So, I don’t believe that I have complete agency in what I am creating. To say that would imply that I have complete control over what happens in the darkroom. I’m something more like a vessel, or a translator. My job is to stay light and transparent so I can help whatever is there to come through me.
In your work, there is a recurring constraint: the headless figure, the darkroom. What draws you to the headless figure?
The simple read is personal. Early on, I lost the connection to my own body, and the fragmented figure was that feeling of being split between body and mind. But what I came to appreciate later is that the constraint itself liberates. Covering the head restricts the part of me that wants to make sense, to control. From the viewer’s side, without a face to identify, they can’t sort the figure into who-she-is or who-they-are; they meet it without the rational layer and see something free from their normal labels. The darkroom applies the same constraint to my process. Quite literally, the precision and process cut out the thinking layer. Constraint cuts off my mind so the work can come through.
You once made your darkroom portable. What does carrying the whole process, not just the camera change?
Before leaving for a residency in Morocco some years back, I found a 1954 enlarger for five euros, packed powdered chemistry, stuffed it into a valise, and brought it with me to the remote village I was staying in. Photography tends to slip into ‘taking’, an extractive process of separating the stories from the subject. While in the villages, I invited residents to join me at night under the red light so they could watch their own latent images appear. From this experience, I learned that photography can be used to reveal instead of capture.
Memory keeps returning to the work. What pulls you back to it?
Since childhood, I’ve circled one question: what remains of me when all my memories are gone? Memory isn’t a fixed archive; it’s retold, displaced, edited, and invented. Memories are stories, and stories are never told the same way twice. We store memories in the mind, but also in the body. This is one reason the body appears so often in my work: it expresses the echoes of memories that no words can do. Space itself holds it too.
The sound of every performance inside a venue is held in its walls until the day they fall. Photomontage is where all these separate forms of memories, held in a body, an object, a place, get layered into a single image. What is reconstructed is not some memory from the past, but rather, it seems that if I capture it at just the right angle, a memory is revealed that didn’t exist in the pieces themselves.
What relationships do you have with the unexpected?
Very often, the unexpected is simply what is already there, directly in front of us, but no longer visible because we have become blind through routine. Daily life asks us to function efficiently. We move through habits, systems, schedules, and obligations. To engage with the unexpected, then, is not to discover a category of things on the opposite side of expected. It is a practice of perception. Nothing is mundane. There is only the attention we fail to pay to it.
Kathrin Hanga – www.kathrinhanga.com
Kathrin Hanga studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Tokyo University of the Arts, and L’École Internationale de Théatre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. Her work has been shown in Vienna, Tokyo, London, and New York.