Adad Hannah
at the Fairmont Pacific Rim

Adad Hannah is known for his photographs and videos that explore the cinematic potential of tableaux vivants: a genre of performance featuring costumed models remaining as still as possible. Referencing famous art historical paintings and restaging them using contemporary technologies, Hannah’s work refreshes the relationship between the subject of the artwork and the viewer, encouraging us to consider our own bodies in relation to those in each image.

In addition to Hannah’s interest in re-considering historical painting today through the lens of photography, works in this exhibition also focus on his collaborative, community-based approach to art making. Presented on the main floor are three works from Hannah’s project Blackwater Ophelia, inspired by the 1852 painting Ophelia, a famous work with great attention paid to the natural world by the British realist painter John Everett Millais. On the second floor is a large-scale installation based on Picasso’s Guernica, one of the most iconic anti-war paintings of all times, as well as selected works from Hannah’s series The Decameron Retold. In each elaborately staged body of work, the presence of props, stage supports, and hand-painted elements highlight each work’s construction, emphasizing the process of creating each image.

Adad Hannah was born in New York in 1971, spent his childhood in Israel and England, and moved to Vancouver in the early 1980s. His work is represented in public and private collections around the world, and has been exhibited extensively in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, West Africa, China, South Korea, Australia, Russia, Argentina, and Brazil. Hannah holds a PhD and an MFA from Concordia University in Montreal, and a BFA from the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver.