Hanakam & Schuller

The artifacts of the Vienna-based artist duo Hanakam & Schuller are often shape-shifters, changing their outer form and reappearing in different contexts. As artists and researchers, Markus Hanakam and Roswitha Schuller reshape the rules of the visual arts and create idiosyncratic orders and new world designs in videos and objects. In doing so, they reflect and ironize various historical and contemporary artistic strategies as well as their means of expression.
They work mainly in the field of video, interactive computer applications and functional objects.

Their works have been shown in Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Eyebeam art and technology center in New York, Paris’ Palais de Tokyo, Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Culture, Vienna’s MAK, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, and Tokyo’s National Art Center.

Their video— animation The Borgia Device (Second Day) is part of the show ANTHROPOCENE ON HOLD — 20 artists address the impact of a global pandemic on arts ecosystems and earth’s resilience and sustainability — by PCAI Polyeco Contemporary Art Initiative in Piraeus, Greece, curated by Kika Kyriakakou, accompanied by a catalogue with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Nadim Samman, Selina Nwulu (2020–21). Recent and upcomning shows include a solo at Kunsthalle CCA in Andratx, Baleares, and Casino Luxembourg.

The human urge to shape nature with simultaneous, almost naïve fascination with its appearance; marginal areas of the scientific and their own poetics; visual language systems and architectures parlantes: Hanakam & Schuller create idiosyncratic visual worlds and, especially in their film projects, bring them into tension with historical references from literature, science and art, thereby, almost unnoticed, depicting themes of great topicality.
Leon Hösl