Alumni Profile: Hana Sackler, Studio Arts College International

Hana Sackler works with video, sound and still images investigating the themes of perception, identity and the unusual in the everyday. She uses these media to look at the ordinary and extract those unknown moments that make us question the subtleties of the familiar. Most recently she has been working on a series of photos and videos influenced by events after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As a part of the 48 Hours Neukölln Art Festival Weekend in Berlin, Hana created a video and sound piece called Game Call for the exhibition Shades of Today – Picking up the Pieces Post-Truth at the contemporary art space Centrum. Game Call combines artificial and recorded everyday sounds with video sequences that, over time, intensify in quantity of audio and visual stimuli as well as rhythm. This increasing repetition creates a video and audio experience overloaded with contradictory information, emulating our media-saturated way of life. As our perceptions constantly change through what we are experiencing, we ask ourselves, where does the truth lie?

Hana Sackler is originally from Brooklyn, New York but has been based in Berlin since 2016. From 2014 – 2016, she attended Studio Arts College International in Florence, Italy, graduating with an MFA in Photography. In 2015, she won best in show at Art Clash in Florence, and her winning photo was chosen for the permanent collection at the Contemporary Art Museum in Florina, Greece. In 2016, she was invited to exhibit her photographs through Slideluck Prato at Galleria Lato in Prato, Italy.

She has further exhibited her work at the Museum of Natural History in Florence, Consiglio Regionale-Tosacana, Le Murate PAC, Gallery Biagiotti Progetti Arte, and Millepiani in Rome. Hana’s work has been published online through Essentialist and YET magazine. She is a founding member of SCALENO, an international photographic collective started in 2015 with Leslie Hickey and Ana Lía Orézzoli. They are currently working on their first project entitled Some Other Place which is about distance, place and the everyday, linking three artists living in different cities around the world. They will use their photographs collaboratively, as building blocks to construct their own fictional city, a new truth that exists solely on the page as Some Other Place.