What is where? Hannah Höch's House
Prototype 360° installation, archive image fragments from Ektachrome slides, blueback paper
Installation detail
Brainworks, Wu Tsai Institute, Yale University 2025
What is Where? Hannah Höch’s House is a prototype 360° installation composed of archival image fragments printed on blueback paper. Details from photographs of Hannah Höch’s house (Rainer König, 1978) are repeatedly cropped, scaled, and grouped, evoking the experience of navigating her interior space.
Developed as part of a wider research project, the work proposes What is Where? as a method of understanding Hannah Höch’s radical imagination and her worldview of polarities, subjective perception, and multiple viewpoints. Höch (1889–1978) – the only female artist of the Berlin Dada movement – advanced new conceptions of the image that broke with traditional male practices of painting and photography. This way of modern seeing anticipated current interdisciplinary approaches to perception and cognition.
Hamann approaches Höch through her archives and home, a site that served as studio, refuge during Nazi Germany, and repository for Berlin Dada. Research at the Berlinische Galerie uncovered photographs by Höch’s nephew Rainer König, her notebooks, and previously unknown colour Ektachrome slides. During a residency at Yale’s Wu Tsai Institute, the installation also became an experiment linking artistic interpretation with perceptual science.