Dehlia Hannah
Hannah is a philosopher and curator. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, where her Ny Carlsberg funded project Rewilding the Museum examines the art museum’s status within the fragile ecologies of the Anthropocene. Her book A Year Without a Winter (Columbia University Press, 2018) reframes contemporary imaginaries of climate change by revisiting the environmental conditions under which Frankenstein was written and the global aftermath of the 1815 eruption of Vulcano Tambora.
Discourse on the Anthropocene has unsettled the distinction between nature and culture, shifting artistic attention toward the dominant planetary condition. Dehlia Hannah’s lecture moves from this perspective, following the trajectories traced by her project Rewilding Museum, developed in collaboration with The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and ARKEN Museum of Modern Art. For Hannah, this perspective expands the curatorial mandate, leading it to follow artistic practices beyond the museum and to examine them as a conceptual territory charged with tensions.
Her critical gaze thus moves between art that reflects on—and operates within—environmental imaginaries such as artists working among the debris of modernity; in wastewater treatment plants or in burned forests amongst other forms of technê that seek to transform the Earth: infrastructural works, geoengineering, exclusion zones, blackouts and rewilding projects.
The lecture, like the Rewilding Museum project itself, holds art and science together and invites participants to reflect on how “environments” are represented, mediated and produced both inside and outside the museum today.
The encounter unfolded alongside the workshop led by Silvia Costa and continued in the evening with a reading session around the fire. The readings included excerpts from The Psychoanalysis of Fire by Gaston Bachelard, passages from Frankenstein. Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley, and the short story To Build a Fire by Jack London.
