Time is the given in Nanna Hänninen’s conceptual photography practice – as it is in all photography. Photography records an instant and marks too that it has passed and is gone. Furthermore, Hänninen’s book Now is Now and the exhibition it accompanied, ‘How about the Future’ at Serlachius Museums Gösta in 2020, are marked by her investigation of how we conceive of and comprehend time.
Now is Now is composed of images by Hänninen, both her own source images and sculptures and works based on found images, interleaved through a text by Finnish philosopher Tuomas Nevanlinna and bookened by an excerpt from curator Laura Kuurne’s essay on Hänninen’s work. Paging through the book, which fits neatly into the reader’s hand, one encounters a reflection on how the understanding of time has developed in Western thinking, how it might be otherwise, while looking at images marked by their transience, such as sculptures braced around blocks of ice, historic photographs or further works that illustrate an action in two parts. Hänninen is moved by climate change to review how we look at the future; her work expresses the urgency of rejecting the methods we habitually employ to consider history and time passing. Instead, she fashions experimental models of what might be to come.
Texts by Laura Kuurne and Tuomas Nevanlinna.
Photographic artist Nanna Hänninen (b. 1973) lives and works in Kuopio, Finland. She studied at the Lahti Institute of Design in Finland, the Hochschule für Kunst und Gestaltung in Zürich and she is a 2002 graduate of the University of Art of Photography Department in Helsinki. She is a member of the Helsinki School and one of the most internationally successful Finnish photographic artists.