Katrin Hanusch is a multidisciplinary artist based in London whose sculptures, installations, performances and drawings explore material transformation, interconnectedness and the complicated relationship between human activity and the environment. Her site-responsive works frequently bring together the discarded remains of contemporary life with organic and industrial materials, creating strange, sometimes dystopian environments in which familiar objects appear to have acquired new functions or forms of agency.
Hanusch works with an unusually broad material vocabulary, including dismantled LED laptop screens, copper pipes, leather, wood, rope, metals, wax, ceramic shell and the by-products of industrial processes. Rather than treating these materials simply as components from which to construct an artwork, she responds to their existing histories, damage and physical characteristics. Broken technologies and discarded objects become sculptural matter again, allowing questions of consumption, obsolescence, waste and sustainability to emerge through the process of making.
Technology is a recurring presence within her practice, particularly through works made from obsolete electronic screens. By dismantling laptops and stripping screens of their original ability to transmit information, Hanusch transforms devices associated with images and communication into sources of light, colour and physical material. Cables, power supplies and damaged components remain deliberately visible, shifting attention from the digital information normally displayed by these objects towards the infrastructure and matter that make digital culture possible.
Born and educated in Germany, Hanusch studied at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle before completing an MA in Sculpture with Distinction at the Royal College of Art in London in 2014. Her work has subsequently been presented through exhibitions, commissions and residencies in the UK and internationally, including projects at BALTIC 39, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Pangaea Sculptors’ Centre and The Bomb Factory, alongside site-specific interventions in London, Spain, Mexico and India.
Across her practice, Hanusch treats materials as participants rather than passive substances. Organic matter, technological debris and industrial remnants exist within the same cycles of use, deterioration and transformation as the human body itself. By finding new possibilities within things that have been broken, abandoned or rendered obsolete, Katrin Hanusch creates work that considers what our material culture leaves behind—and what unexpected forms might emerge from its remains.
17 June 2019 • Staff
Hanusch has admirably transformed the everyday store – bringing art into an unexpected and ordinary space. Hanusch’s next show in July, “The Slippery Scenario”, will be at the APT Gallery in Deptford. After that, “Existing in an un-real world” at Artlicks Weekend 2019.
