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Peace be with you, 2023

Hannah Imhoff

Profile picture of Hannah Imhoff

Activism, social science or conceptual art - whatever I did so far, it was always about the same thing: questioning human-made conditions we find ourselves within society.

My work is a dialog with society and art is my current language. I choose this language because I believe that art has the ability to shape people‘s fundamental perception: it touches us on another level, which is deeper than understanding something just with our mind.

Activism, social science or conceptual art - whatever I did so far, it was always about the same ...

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.

Final work

Peace be with you, 2023

Documentation of a performance in London

Video camera by Monika Drabot

The image contains: four bus chairs from the front, bus handels and a monitor showing the performance video.

The installation is in the Triangle space, in a big shared space right at the beginning of the MA Show.

The image contains: four bus chairs from the back, bus handels and a monitor showing the performance video.
Image shows a stop button attached to a pipe in my studio space.

Research and process

Image of a bus depot

Asking for old bus parts in a bus depot.

Image showing bus parts like little bus seat pillows.

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Peace be with you, 2023

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 h...

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