Maureen Paley builds upon an early connection with Hannah Collins having first shown her work in an exhibition Evidence in the Streets – War Damage Volumes in 1984.
Hannah Collins’ large format black-and-white photographs brought her to prominence during the 1980s and she was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1993. Her work draws attention to historical and social frameworks, addressing this through a wide range of subjects and geographical locations with images of interiors, exteriors, interactions and specific objects. Examples of her work are held in many collections including the Dallas Art Museum (USA), MACBA (Spain), Pompidou Centre (France), Reina Sofia Museum (Spain), Sprengel Museum (Germany), Tate (UK), and Walker Art, Center (USA) amongst others.
In 2015 a retrospective of her work was shown at the Sprengel Museum Hannover, in conjunction with the award of the Spectrum Prize and travelled to Camden Art Centre, London and Baltic Centre, Newcastle. Her latest work – I will make up a song and sing it in a theatre with the night air above my head, has been shown at SF MOMA San Francisco (2019), Tapies Foundation Barcelona (2019) and at the Rotterdam Film Festival (2020). Recently Hannah Collins and Paul Goodwin co-curated We Will Walk – Art and Resistance in the American South at Turner Contemporary in Margate, UK (2020).
