Adad Hannah was born in New York in 1971, spent his childhood in Israel and England, and moved to Vancouver in the early 1980’s. He lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.
Adad Hannah explores historically trenchant themes through elaborate bodies of work that include installation, video, and photography. Inspired by the historical practice of tableaux vivants (translated as “living pictures”), Hannah’s overall practice invokes the durational form of early cinema, while also making reference to early photography by mimicking paintings at a time when it was the very goal of photography to do so. Time occupies a prominent place in Hannah’s production, forged by a lasting interest in temporality and its complex relationship with photography and video.
He has exhibited widely, including at the Musée National des Beaux-arts du Québec (2008), the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal (2008), the Zendai MoMA, Shanghai (2009), the Ke Center for Contemporary Art (Shanghai 2008), the Vancouver Art Gallery (2007), the National Gallery of Canada (2011, 2006). In 2004 he won the installation/new media award at the Toronto Images Festival and the Bogdanka Poznanovic award at Videomedeja 8. His works can be found in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Ke Center for Contemporary Art (Shanghai), the art gallery Nationale Zacheta (Warsaw), Bank of Montreal and Royal Bank of Canada.
