Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

White Passage

Image caption
HANNAH COLLINS

White Passage

  • 1994
  • Silver gel print on baryta paper on fabric support
  • 165,5 x 214 cm
  • Edition 1/3
  • Cat. F_57
  • Acquired in 2001
By:
Isabel Tejeda

During her first years in Barcelona (1989-2010), the British photographer and film maker Hannah Collins produced a series of poetic yet cryptic images with surrealistic resonances, building theatrical sets that connected recognisable everyday objects, whose significance seemed to go further than any initial direct interpretation. She showed some of those series in 1993 at a solo show at the Centre d’Art Santa Mónica in Barcelona. In the catalogue, Iwona Blazwick noted that Collins’s many pictures of tables and of still-lifes on white tablecloths had links to the Baroque vanitas.

White Passage (1994) seems to be chained to those still-lifes in its references to transition and death. The image is of two tables covered and connected by a large white sheet; both are topped by two piles of turf from which plastic tubes emerge. Collins published this photograph again in her book Finding, Transmitting, Receiving (2007), writing that its meaning is linked to other images from a series entitled Ghost, which refers to both memory and disappearance. It was a collection of old photographs of calling-card type that she found in a shop in Nizhny Novgorod in central Russia. She stressed that these were people who wished to be remembered after their death. This finding coincided with the clearing of the family home after the death of her mother in 2004: she found drawings from her childhood from forty-five years earlier which she also considered a ‘leap to the past, like a bridge in time’.

Isabel Tejeda

 
By:
Roberto Díaz
Hannah Collins
London 1956

After studying at the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London (1974-1978), Hannah Collins completed her training in the USA on a Fulbright Scholarship (1974-1978). Collins is a multidisciplinary artist, who uses experimental video, multi-screen installations, text and large format photography. She received international acclaim as a trailblazer in choosing to work on an almost filmic scale in pursuit of the sentimental and spatial involvement of the viewer. Since the end of the 1970s, Collins’s work has focused on photographs and the conditions for producing meaning to deliberate on post-modern Europe. Her works are based on travel and documentation. Of particular interest are her anthropological explorations of marginal social groups, such as immigrants and ethnic minorities. She reflects their identifies, overlooked by the hegemonic history of global capitalism. She reveals the specific in opposition to the uniform generality of modernity in her emotional and ethical meditations on otherness, memory, the urban landscape, space or the marks of time, such as her Signs of Life (1992-1994) series of photographs taken in Istanbul and In the Course of Time (1994-1996), a series shot in eastern Europe, along with still-lifes in her everydayness and processuality.

During her career, Collins has taken part in multiple film festivals and other international events, including the Venice Biennale (1988 and 2011) and the Istanbul Biennial (1992). Her solo shows include her exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art (London, 1989); the Tate Gallery (London, 2000); the Centre for Contemporary Art (Warsaw, 1993); the Centre d’Art Santa Mónica (Barcelona, 1993); the Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow, 1996); the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, 1996); the Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea (Donostia/San Sebastián, 1996); the Peer Foundation (London, 2003); Malaga Contemporary Art Centre (2003); Atrium Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country (Vitoria-Gasteiz, 2008); the Georges Pompidou Centre (Paris, 2009); and the Sprengel Museum (Hannover, 2015). In 1991, Collins received the European Photography Reward, Berlin and in 2015 the Spectrum International Prize for Photography. In 1993, she was nominated for the Turner Prize.

Roberto Díaz

 
«Loft», Galería Joan Prats (Barcelona, 1995). «Slow Time», Galería Helga de Alvear (Madrid, 1995-1996). «Slow Time», Galería Joan Prats (Basel, 1997). «Slow Time», Galería Joan Prats (Cáceres, 2001). «Flowers & Fruit. Banco de España Collection», Banco de España (Madrid, 2022-2023).
Vv.Aa. Desván, Barcelona, Galeria Joan Prats, 1995. Vv.Aa. Hanna Collins. Filming Things, Paris, Centre national de la photographie, 1997. Hannah Collins Finding, Transmitting, Receiving, London, Black Dog Publishing Limited, 2007.