Michael Hahn

Michael Hahn beschreibt den Zustand erschöpfter Frustration in Bezug auf das Gefühl verpasster Chancen: „Wenn du dich verirrst, wenn du zu spät dran bist, möchtest du vielleicht den Anderen die Schuld geben und dich auf die Zerstörung von dir selbst und anderen Menschen einlassen“. Ein Weg, dies zu korrigieren, besteht laut Hahn darin, die kleinen, magischen Momente den Tag hindurch zu verfolgen: „Wenn man die kleinen Wunder nicht sieht, kann man alles Große vergessen.“

Hinter der Kurve zu stehen, also scheinbar später als die meisten auf eine neue Idee zu kommen oder auf etwas zu reagieren, nachdem es bereits geschehen ist, ist die Ausgangsidee der Ausstellung Already Too Late. Eine Bewegung, die durchkreuzt wird, ein Absturz, ein – wenn auch nur vorübergehendes – Steckenbleiben oder gestrandet sein, findet sich in Arbeiten wie Tide und Tic-Tac. Immer wieder gibt es Anspielungen auf vereinfachtes Design, jedoch nicht um Rationalität auf das Wesentliche zu reduzieren, sondern vielmehr bei Objekten, die aus im Wesentlichen billigen, anpassungsfähigen Komponenten bestehen und für die Massenproduktion tauglich sein könnten. So entstehen Arbeiten, an denen das tägliche Leben als ein eigenständiges ästhetisches Artefakt neu aufbereitet wird. Sie folgen Hahns Wunsch, das Besondere im Alltäglichen zu erkennen.

„Neue, spannende Dinge bringen neue Ideen, neue Perspektiven und lösen so die entscheidenden Impulse auf dem Weg zu einem besseren Selbstverständnis aus. Ohne den Blick auf neue spannende, überraschende Dinge, nützt auch die größte Idee nicht zur inneren Befriedung und nur Ärger, Depression, Lebensverneinung bleiben bestehen. Die Komplexität des Alltags ist nicht das Problem. Schlechtes Urteilsvermögen, Mangel an Reflexion und gekaufte Dummheit fördern apokalyptische Bosheit.“ Besorgt, dass viele „bereits auf dem Weg zum Hass“ sind, konzentriert sich Michael Hahn in seiner Arbeit auf Momente der Erheiterung, Behaglichkeit und Zerstreuung. „Freundlich. Nicht zu viel Zerstörung. Etwas Spaß. Kein erhobener Zeigefinger. Nichts Didaktisches. Weg vom potenziell destruktiven Denken, wenn auch nur für einen Moment.“

Michael Hahn describes a state of exhausted frustration in relation to this sense of missed chances: “If you lose your way, are already too late, you might wish to blame other people and engage in destruction, of self and of others.” A way to rectify this according to Hahn is in finding motivation through the small, seemingly magical moments in life. “If you don‘t see the little wonders, you can forget about anything big.”

Being behind the curve, that is to change to a new idea or way of doing something later than most, or to react to something after it has already happened, is a notion Hahn plays with in each of his works. Movement that has been thwarted is also implied. A crash, being stuck or marooned, though perhaps only temporarily, can be found in works such as Tide and Tic-tac. A nod to simplistic design exists, but not where rationality is distilled down to its essence. Rather, it is where objects consist of components that are essentially cheap, adaptable, and possible to massproduce. It is also where daily life is remade as an aesthetic artefact in its own right. This follows from Hahn‘s desire to recognize the incredible in the mundane.

“New exciting things bring new ideas, new perspectives and thus the decisive impulses on the journey to find oneself. If these do not pave the way to one‘s own peace, even the greatest idea is of no use against annoyance, depression, life negation. The complexity is not the problem. It is poor judgement, lack of reflection and bought stupidity that call for apocalyptic malice.” Concerned about seeing many as “already on a path to hate,” Hahn focuses on his work being more about joy, which can take the forms of amusement, comfort or even distraction. “Easy to befriend. Not too much destruction. Something which hopefully gives a moment of enjoyment. It‘s not meant to be a finger pointing to anything. Nothing didactic is intended. Just having a good time and taking people out of their potentially destructive thinking, if only for a moment.”

In the exhibition “Timing is Everything”, Michael Hahn has developed a world expressed in a series of installative situations, whose appearance is associated with happenstance and play along with perturbation and disturbance.

While creating the new work, Hahn was particularly influenced by both time spent in the USA during the 2016 presidential election and by the Doomsday Clock Statement released in early 2018 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists informing the public about threats to the survival and development of humanity from nuclear weapons, climate change, and emerging technologies and biological hazards. With these recent developments in mind, he found a merger between object and subject, a disappearance of distance between his GDR influenced adolescence and current world events and perceptions.

Hahn’s previous work often deals with fragile structures and situations consisting of common household items or construction materials. Their scale, color and sometimes odd material combinations set a tone reflecting feelings of a contemporary ridiculousness in dealing with topics of domestic dwellings, the environment, a policed state, public events and prized possessions.

Utilizing relatively banal, almost childlike foundations, Hahn attempts to deal with deeper driving forces from economic, social, and political themes of ownership – questioning the preciousness of consumables in a world where the quality or state of being ridiculous or wildly unreasonable is ever present.

Compositions of everyday elements – stairs, synthetic feather dusters, wooden boards, led lights – which are assembled so as to welcome a DIY imitation of crafting our own environments, arriving at a contemporary mash-up that is at once an astonishing parody of the control centres of the cold-war era combined with a functioning world clock, antiquated T.V. monitors displaying firsthand footage of policed pumpkin festivals, unpopulated public parks and tumbling river Styroam, along with comparative studies on the history of signage in sculpture and as tool for expressing opinions.