This body of work stems from the artist Hannah Höch’s material output and her activities during the Third Reich, which include growing plants prohibited by Nazi horticulturalists while simultaneously burying in her garden Dada photomontages banned by the fascist regime. From there, the lectures explore seeds as archives, the violence inherent in the disciplinary space of the garden, the language of planting within colonial frameworks, Germany’s colonial project as it extends through the formulation of the nation-state, and the ideological distinction between “humans” and “nature”.
Taking the form of lectures, the project began as artistic research when Alhena was a student at the Glasgow School of Art and expanded in scope when she received a Scottish Arts Council Development Bursary to visit Höch’s home, garden, and archives at Berlinische Galerie in 2009.
Image: Alhena Katsof, Digging Hannah Höch, 2008
Thursday November 16th, 2017
A talk about Hannah Höch's garden, from within the folds of Susan Cianciolo's exhibition RUN PRAYER, RUN CAFÉ, RUN LIBRARY, at Bridget Donahue.
April 1, 2016
At the invitation of Rongwrong in Amsterdam, as part of the ongoing program All Heal (Valerian), Alhena delivered a lecture about the relationship between fascism and ecology.
Much as a twig might receive sap from a living plant if inserted into the slit of a trunk or stem correctly, this talk is grafted from one onto another. At Rongwrong, we explore process-oriented events such Hannah Höch’s burial of Dada photomontages in her garden during World War II, and the relevance of these gestures in our own troubled, authoritarian times.
Photo: Alhena Katsof, Moscow 2009
August 31, 2013
At the invitation of Gordan Hall and the Center for Experimental Lectures, Alhena delivered a lecture about gardens as non-binary sites of death and becoming. The lecture was delivered during an event hosted at The Shandaken Project in Phoenicia.
Go into a garden - full of plants, herbs, flowers and weeds. As Giacomo Leopoldi says, 'Everywhere you look, you will find pain'. Loosely based on a body of research about Hannah Höch and her inner-exile through World War II, this lecture explores normative drag via the stories of gardeners: Medlar Lucan & Durian Gray, Hannah Höch, Derek Jarman and Vita Sackville-West.
Follow this link for the video and transcript.