Adad Hannah: Intimate Encounters

Canadian artist Adad Hannah creates staged photographs and video tableaux that reinterpret art-historical masterpieces and raise questions about the change and evolution of a work’s meaning over time. For Adad Hannah: Intimate Encounters at the San Antonio Museum of Art, Hannah exhibits projects created in response to an antique bust of Eros and Aphrodite, a painting of Adam and Eve by Albrecht Dürer, and a nude sculpture from The Burghers of Calais by Auguste Rodin. Chosen for their subtle erotic overtones, these selections from Hannah’s oeuvre complement the concurrent exhibition Aphrodite and the Gods of Love.

Located at the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain, the bust of Eros and Aphrodite is shown in Hannah’s photographs and videos with a woman and man poised kiss the lips of the god and goddess depicted in the sculpture. Also produced at the Prado, Blocking Adam and Eve includes photographs and videos of a young man holding an implement to conceal the fig-leaved genitals of Adam and Eve in Albrecht Dürer’s painting of the biblical duo. For Unwrapping Rodin, a photographic sequence shows the nude statue in various stages of undress as wrapping paper is peeled away from it.

For this exhibition, Hannah was invited to select a work from the SAMA collection as inspiration for a new series of photographs and videos, using volunteers from the San Antonio community as models. This new project joins the projects cited above in SAMA’s feature exhibition for the 2012 edition of FotoSeptiembreUSA.

The FotoSeptiembreUSA International Photography Festival is an eclectic forum for the exhibition and celebration of photography and photography-based art forms. Founded in 1995, FotoSeptiembreUSA has fostered a tremendous growth in the photographic arts in South Texas. Established and mid-career artists showcase their talents alongside a burgeoning pool of new talent to explore photography both as an art form and as a means of personal and cultural expression.