Maria Hanl

Maria Hanl’s work explores the fractures within the social fabric, employing drawing, photography, text, video, and installation as tools for observation and inquiry.

With an apparent lightness, she examines contemporary conditions and, through poetic configurations, seeks to make complex and elusive phenomena visible and sensorially tangible.

Her works reveal those points where systems deceive, blur perception, or conceal violence – where processes tip into the absurd, break down, or begin to crumble. They make palpable the ways in which exhaustion and fragility are woven into everyday life.

Hanl is interested in the multiplicity of social subsystems, their interconnections and exclusions, thereby questioning their autopoietic functioning. What happens when the conditions that sustain their reproduction disappear? Niklas Luhmann defines the social as the unity of information, utterance, and understanding. Hanl gives form to the fragile states in which this synthesis gradually unravels, becomes distorted through mechanisms of propaganda, and leads to the implosion of the social fabric.
She opens up a space for reflection on limits, exhaustion, and the hidden mechanisms that underpin social order. Without offering univocal answers, her work unfolds a strong poetic resonance.

Maria Hanl studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She has received numerous awards and grants, including the Austrian State Scholarship for Visual Arts, and has undertaken artist residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, Ålvik (Norway), Bern (Switzerland), and Český Krumlov (Czech Republic), among others.

Her works are held in public collections and have been exhibited internationally.

She lives and works in Vienna.

• Website of the artist