Alexander Hahn

Alexander Hahn (born 1954) is a Swiss artist. A distinguished video pioneer, he has continued to this day to be an artistic innovator in a range of electronic media, working with computer animation and imagery, net art, video, sculpture, installation, performance and printmaking.

Life

Hahn grew up in Rapperswil-Jona, Switzerland. Introduced to computers while at the gymnasium Kantonsschule Zürcher Oberland in Wetzikon (1966–1973), he created a game of snakes and ladders in the APL (programming language). During his studies in Visual arts education at the Zurich University of the Arts (Bachelor in 1979), he made his first videos and Super8 films, e.g. Flight and Glass (1976) or the Mockumentary Demis (1977) about the singer Demis Roussos. In 1981, he moved to New York and participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (ISP).

In 1990 he spent nine months in Rome as a fellow of the Istituto Svizzero. Between 1991 and 1994 he lived in Berlin, first as a fellow of the DAAD, the German Academic Exchange Service, then as Artist-in-residence at ART+COM. From 1995 to 1997, he lived in Warsaw. Today, Hahn lives and works in the Lower East Side of New York City and in Zurich.

Work

Since his first exhibition at the Lucerne Gallery Apropos in 1978, Hahn showed his work worldwide in over 20 solo exhibitions and in over 100 group shows and video festivals. In 2007, the Kunstmuseum Solothurn and Museum der Moderne Salzburg organized a retrospective about his work.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art showed his interactive work "Luminous Point" in 2008 in the bi-personal show "Room for Thought - Alexander Hahn and Yves Netzhammer."