Hanna Rédling is one of the most charismatic photographers of her generation. Her works focus on the uncertainty of present existence and understanding of individual and collective nostalgia. Having a cinematic edge, her artworks create an elaborate microcosmos that blends past and present, reality and fantasy with a strong sense of storytelling. Her photographs depict childish curiosity and optimism merged with anxiety rooted in the unpredictability of the future world. The attitude that sometimes analyses the memories of the past and the fever dream-like present and future at other times, calls forth an alternative world that converges in space and time.
Amidst the unpredictability of our time, nostalgia has become a defence mechanism of the psyche, an ambivalent emotional state where its function of masking and embellishing negative experiences has grown to an everyday aspect in people’s lives. Building on nostalgia as a personal experience as well as a social sentiment, Rédling’s surviving strategy is to create her own world while revealing the fine line between reality and fiction.
In the focus of the exhibition, the eponymous installation ’Moon Motel’ (2021) pictures a threshold and draws a transitional phase between reality and nostalgia in which everything is still in motion, in search of a resting point, reflecting the confusion and tension around and within us. Just as on her photographs, where elastic, jelly-like textures and timeless compositions emphasize the floating state of body and mind. Creating liminal spaces, Rédling creates visual experiences of the moment, when one has already departed but has not reached one’s objective yet.