Maria Hanl

Maria Hanl studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna and the Slade School of Fine Art, London.

“Maria Hanl’s works refer to those points where our system deceives us, obscures the senses, or euphemistically veils its violent side. There, where it goes no further or tips over into the absurd, where something breaks off or bends too far, crumbles or fades – where the system ends or collapses.

The artist finds metaphorical constellations for how these processes are interwoven with our everyday life, which are able to capture or describe precisely these inexplicable states of exhaustion in a phenomenon.

Maria Hanl is interested in the fact that our sociological system consists of numerous different systems, which we encounter on a daily basis but view separately because each one only comprises a small, often very specific realm of knowledge or operational measures. Hence, they always connect to numerous areas of life but due to their properties exclude all of the others at the same time.

The systems – and this is what Maria Hanl’s works demonstrate – are per se already exhausted and limited because of their constitution. The artist implicates the autopoeitic loop of self-creation in a contradiction, for what happens when the condition for the creation of the respective system is no longer confirmed?

Niklas Luhmann says in his thesis “that sociality comes about only in the fusion or synthesis of these three components. In other words, the social comes about whenever information, utterance, and understanding are produced as a unity that has feedback effects on the participating psychic systems.”* And adds: “The psychic systems must behave in a specific way for this to succeed.”

In her work Maria Hanl establishes that there are moments when psychic systems no longer behave as they should, meaning they do not always keep adapting to the system but rather transform it by appropriating it. Ultimately, these processes are creative but were always generated from their inner destructive exhaustion.”

Excerpt from the text by Synne Genzmer: The Beautiful Form, The Time, The Collapse / On the Communication of Systems in the Works of Maria Hanl.

*Niklas Luhmann, Psychic and Social Systems, in “Introduction to Systems Theory”, ed. Dirk Baecker, trans. Peter Gilgen (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 190 –191.

• Website of the artist