HANNA BURKART ARTIST RESIDENCY PROJECT

30 October - 10 November 2024 / 14 April - 3 May 2025 Linguaglossa Etna Nord

Hanna Burkart, born in Vienna (Austria), holds a Master's degree in Industrial Design and a Master's degree in Fine Arts from the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her artistic education is complemented by significant studies in Site-specific Art with Paul Petritsch, Landscape Design with Mario Terzic and Martha Schwartz, Sculpture and Multimedia with Erwin Wurm, and Industrial Design with Paolo Piva. 
Burkart’s research focuses on the interaction between space and the human being who inhabits it. Her approach intertwines conceptual with performative art and embraces various media: drawing, writing, sculpture, photography, and installations.
Her artistic practice deconstructs reality, questioning conventions and revealing new perspectives through a language that examines the relationship between the body and the spatial context.
Hanna Burkart leaves tangible marks of a rediscovered existence in memories and dreams, capturing the essence of a living space and translating it into an aesthetic narration through the documentation of the diversities of day and night life.  Photographs of everyday objects construct identity traces of a transient existence: since 2016, Hanna Burkart has chosen to constantly move, without settling in one place. Nomadism represents an important methodology in Hanna Burkart’s artistic research, largely oriented towards the broader aspects of sleep. Falling into a deep sleep establishes a profound connection between the artist and the space, which becomes a container of unconscious night memories that manifest in the artist’s drawings and writings.
Hanna Burkart creates a connection with the space in which she both creates and lives. This connection can be extended to the objects she makes and those that already exist in the living space. The process involves a deep engagement with the space itself, which includes the rearrangement of things within that space. It is not just about creating something new, but it is also about understanding, re-contextualising, and reinterpreting the elements that already exist.
The objects themselves become symbolic markers of time. Hanna Burkart creates a dialogue between different temporalities: the past that informs the present and the present that actively shapes the future. The unconventional spatial arrangement of common objects required for everyday human activities emphasises Hanna Burkart's critical stance toward social norms. Hanna Burkart's artistic practice is deeply infused with a constant longing for essentiality, with her work standing in stark contrast to the consumer-driven logic of contemporary society. She is questioning our way of living: “Do we have to accept our way of living?”; “Are we able to change it?”; “Why are we living the way we are living?”; “Do we really want it?”.
By constantly questioning the broader societal structures, Hanna Burkart seeks to understand the ways in which she inhabits the space. Instead of letting external forces dictate the rhythm of her stay, Burkart is trying to take an active role in determining how she lives. For her, living is a transformative process that encompasses personal, cultural, and social dimensions. This dynamic interplay between personal transformation and societal influence creates diverse experiences of living that are constantly reshaped by both internal and external forces.
Hanna Burkart’s research evokes Erwin Wurm's dust sculptures, where presence is revealed through absence. Burkart's absence, in her performances' documentation, is revealed by traces of life that, like dust, mark the outlines of a presence. Wrinkled sheets, blankets, pillows are visible signs of a sleep experience deeply connected to the space chosen to be lived in. Examining how the spatial context influences perceptions of everyday activities leads Hanna Burkart to create site-specific installations. Inspired by Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch interventions on spaces, architectures and landscapes, Burkart explores the intimate influence of places on behaviour. In 2021, she spent almost five months in Senegal, where her mother purchased a piece of land to build a house. An intimate and delicate reconnection with nature allowed Hanna Burkart to explore new perspectives on spatial experience. Through the ritual of cleaning on-site, she removed both visible and invisible obstacles from the ground to create an ideal space where the house would be built from ashes. A circle of ashes connected the house to the moonlight that illuminated Hanna Burkart’s outdoor nights in Senegal, surrounded by white fabric for protection. Sleep is an intimate experience, a time when we are at our most vulnerable. 
Burkart sets fragile physical boundaries around her sleeping spaces to feel a sense of psychological safety and belonging.
Hanna Burkart experiences the same sense of belonging through the use of clay, sourced from the same land the house is built on, as a construction material. The organic connection between the raw material and the built space makes the structure more than just a shelter: it becomes a natural extension of its environment. In a similar pursuit of elemental connection and spatial intimacy, Hanna Burkart spent several weeks in Sicily, where she immersed herself in the rugged landscape surrounding the Pantalica caves—an ancient necropolis carved into the rock. These caves, once dwellings and burial sites, became temporary sanctuaries for the artist. The silence of the stone, the layers of history etched into the walls, and the raw natural beauty of the site offered a deep sense of timelessness and reflection. Here, Burkart's sleep rituals found resonance in the cool darkness of the caves, where she documented traces of her presence using photography . Her engagement with Pantalica revealed how ancient, abandoned spaces still carry the psychological weight of habitation, memory, and transformation. The act of inhabiting these ancient voids became both an echo of past lives and a canvas for contemporary reflection, reinforcing her practice of recontextualising space and redefining the boundaries between life, art, and environment.