Sigune Hamann deals with still and moving images. In photographs, videos and installations she explores the effects time and perception have on the construction of mental images. Everyday appearances are transformed into pictures and films which reveal underlying rhythms and meaning. Hamann questions patterns that constitute time sequences and pictorial spaces in the process of seeing.
Formed by her previous experience of collaborations in the performing arts in the early 1980s Hamann's sequential installations and internet works combine factual and fictional fragments while suggesting a continuity of time. In her own process of ‘tracing’ in photographic film-strips Hamann captures the dynamics of public environments. Her photographs and video loops work at a level of abstraction and compression yet they reveal deeper affinities and resonances behind appearances.
‘A very short space of time through very short times of space, a major exhibition of the artist’s work including a site specific film-strip installation and several new photographic and video works was held at the Gallery of Photography Dublin last year and documented in a catalogue with an essay by Sean Rainbird. In the same year Hamann was commissioned to install the film-strip Tivoli (undercurrent) in a newly refurbished power station at Kunsthalle Mainz, Germany reflecting on the relationship of electric lighting and 19th century film and pleasure parks.
Recent site specific video projections include the walking up and down bit at Max Wall’s birthplace also exhibited at the BFI London on his centenary (December 2008/Januray 2009) and waver under the Westway, London (October 2009) as a first installation of Hamann’s ongoing project about the gesture of waving. Hamann continues to explore how to address the viewer or listener personally through gesture and language in video, as in the 4 channel video installation DinnerFor1 exhibited at the British Council Berlin (2005), now part of the permanent collection Verbund, Vienna.