ARTIST STATEMENT

Alexander Hahn’s work begins with the act of recording what might otherwise pass unnoticed: a room, a street, a journey, a passing figure, a flicker of light, a fragment of sound. These moments may appear mundane, but for Hahn each is a singular occurrence, captured briefly by the camera before entering the long latency of the archive.

Much of his work grows from this interval between capture and replay. Images and sounds disappear into the computer as impressions disappear into memory. Years later they may resurface, altered by storage, association, and time, as dreams return fragments of waking life in another order. Working across video, installation, computer graphics, print, animation, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, sound, and writing, Hahn treats media not simply as tools of representation, but as systems of delay, transformation, and reappearance: recording is not the preservation of a moment, but the start of its afterlife.

Practice overview (1976-2026): early works established a vocabulary of layered time and chance; the middle period introduced 3D computer graphics and expanded the practice into installation; recent projects—LED mosaics, kinetic objects, and printing processes—re-materialize the electronic image.

BIOGRAPHY

Alexander Hahn (b. 1954, Rapperswil, Switzerland) has worked in the electronic and digital media arts in Europe and America since the mid 1970s, integrating the time-based forms of video with practices of computer imagery and print, animation, virtual reality, installation, and writing. A graduate of the Zurich University of Arts with a degree in art education (1979), he participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York (1981).

The recipient of numerous honors and awards, Hahn's art has been exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions and film festivals from New York to Zurich, Sydney to Berlin, Beijing to New Delhi. He's had major retrospectives at the Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Switzerland, Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria, and the Padiglione d'Arte Moderna, Ferrara, Italy. In 2023, the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland, presented an extensive survey of his work, entitled Memory of Light - Light of Memory.

Works by Alexander Hahn are featured in many private and public collections, including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, ICP | International Center of Photography, New York, Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, FMAC Geneva, Kunsthaus Zürich, Kunstmuseum Bern, and Kunstzeughaus, Rapperswil.

In addition to reviews in ZKM Mediagramm, Art Papers, Radio WBAI, NY, Huffington Post, Il Manifesto, Basler Zeitung, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Berliner Zeitung, Kunstbulletin and others, various monographs have been published, most notably Alexander Hahn - Works 1976-2007, Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg/DE (2007) and Astral Memories of a Flying Man, Musée Jenisch, Vevey/CH (2002). 

There are two documentaries about his work: 3 Approaches by Matthias Behrens (1994) and Words of Artists/Portraits of Artists by Catherine Gfeller (2012)