Hannah Imhoff

In "Peace be with you, 2023" , I reflected on our behaviour as passengers on London buses. Noticing that we constantly ignore each other on buses, I invited the passengers during a performance to acknowledge each other's presence, shake each other's hands, and wish each other "peace be with you". This artwork disrupts our social reality and our social conventions of public behaviour in a small way, offering an outlook on how it could be different. However, this illusion of personal contact in a bustling city like London is broken again, by also showing the CCTV camera footage of the performance. While I tried to make the passengers perceive each other as individuals, at the end the CCTV camera anonymised again, and everyone, except me became just a number, a white circle. As my work circles around social reality, it was important for me to incorporate real bus materials in my installations, ready-made seats that people had actually traveled on for years. So I collected old bus materials from a bus depot and adapted them so, that they serve as a viewing station in a white cube.