Merzbarn in Progress
Series of panoramic film-strips, infrared photographic slides and sound collage
With support by Grizedale Arts 2023/24
Merzbarn in Progress, YUAG, Yale University Art Gallery, March 2025
Yale University Gallery is hosting an event, Merzbarn in Progress, featuring Sigune Hamann’s photographs of artist Kurt Schwitters’ last Merz building (1947) alongside some of his rarely seen collages from this era. She is interested in these late small textured collages with his immersive Merz environments. Drawing on Schwitters’ radical shift in breaking with historical expectations of pictorial and real space, she translates these tensions to construct images, creating a 360-degree-surround photographic installation. To achieve this, she produced traces of the Merzbarn, using photographic processes of taking analogue panoramic film-strips and infrared slides. Her introduction will include a new audio montage of Schwitters’ correspondence in 1945-47 from several international archives.