Alexander Hahn (born 1954) is an artist working with electronic media. An innovator in his field, he addresses the electronic image as a technological metaphor for perception, memory and dream: signals oscillate between lighting up and blanking out, between sensory presence, mental apparition and oblivion. At the center of his artistic practice is everyday lifeâÂÂthe seemingly ordinary. From daily video recordings, accidental, deliberate, or captured unnoticedâÂÂworks emerge that are processed and transformed on the computer into a wide range of forms: long- and short-form videos, installations, computer images and prints, animations, virtual reality, AI-based image worlds, and prose texts. The personal connects with the universal, weaving imagination, memory, and dream together with art, science, and history. Out of incidental yet singular acts arise precise, poetic reflections on perception, memory, forgetting, dream, and the ways we narrate ourselves. As art historian Dominique Radrizzani writes in the catalog Astral Memories of a Flying Man: "It is this luminous realm of dream that HahnâÂÂs great art of light and shadow rediscovers, using video like those infinite eyes which night has opened in us (Novalis) ... The terrains explored by Hahn are not those of the terrestrial globe anymore, but rather those of the ocular globe, the inward looking hemisphere of the eye."
Hahn was born in Zürich and grew up in Rapperswil-Jona, Switzerland. Introduced to computers while at the gymnasium Kantonsschule Zürcher Oberland in Wetzikon (1966âÂÂ1973), he created a game of snakes and ladders in the APL (programming language). During his studies in Visual arts education at the Zurich University of the Arts (Bachelor in 1979), he made his first videos and Super8 films, e.g. Flight and Glass (1976) or the Mockumentary Demis (1977) about the singer Demis Roussos. In 1981, he moved to New York and participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (ISP).
In 1990, he spent nine months in Rome as a fellow of the Istituto Svizzero. Between 1991 and 1994, he lived in Berlin, first as a fellow of the DAAD, the German Academic Exchange Service, then as Artist-in-residence at ART+COM. From 1995 to 1997, he lived in Warsaw.
Since the late 1970s, Alexander Hahn has transformed episodes from his personal biographyâÂÂas well as references to history and scienceâÂÂinto art, foregrounding psyche, memory, and dream as central points of orientation. In her chapter Miniature and Series: The Re-invention of the Epistolary Form in the Work of Alexander Hahn, Cathie Payne analyses HahnâÂÂs video âÂÂminiaturesâ as a conceptual and aesthetic strategy for capturing transient, ephemeral interactions, discussing them as an intimate and reflective mode of practice (including in relation to accelerated urban density and a changing anthropogenic worldview).
In one of his earliest solo presentations, Hahn showed the performance and installation Wege â Ways: first at Galerie Apropos (Lucerne) in 1978, later at Galerie Toni Gerber (Bern) in 1980, and at 626 Broadway (New York) in 1981. Reviewing the Bern presentation, Res Ingold described the two-day staging in a private house at Schänzlihalde, featuring a salt-covered floor, a wire network under the ceiling, and hanging threads that Hahn lit one after another, so that âÂÂdozens of small firesâ moved through the room; Ingold noted that âÂÂthe performance lasts a long time. The same action is repeated many times, each time a new path. I am fascinated; a thousand ideas pass through my mind.âÂÂ
Since then, Hahn exhibited his work worldwide in over 20 solo exhibitions and in over 100 group shows and video festivals. In 2007, the Kunstmuseum Solothurn and Museum der Moderne Salzburg organized a retrospective about his work. The accompanying bilingual catalogue, Alexander Hahn: Werke/Works 1976âÂÂ2006, edited by Christoph Vögele, was published by Kehrer Verlag (Heidelberg).
In 2008, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presented HahnâÂÂs interactive video projection Luminous Point (2005) in the two-person exhibition Room for Thought: Alexander Hahn and Yves Netzhammer. Luminous Point is an interactive video projection that SFMOMA described as a virtual simulation of HahnâÂÂs Manhattan apartment, functioning as a metaphor for his âÂÂmental landscapeâÂÂ. Using a handheld remote control, viewers steer navigate through a game-like labyrinth of digitally constructed rooms and transitional videos derived from photographic and film records, slipping between reality and fantasy, memory and imagination. Hahn describes the work as âÂÂan investigation of memory and architectureâ in which his small tenement apartment becomes a âÂÂvirtual wunderkammerâ and a potentially infinite labyrinth of spaces. The accompanying catalogue to the 2007 retrospective refers to Luminous Point as âÂÂarchived reminiscence in an interactive memory palaceâÂÂâÂÂa form of mnemonic architecture associated with the classical art of memory (see method of loci).
In 2022/23, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen presented Memory of Light â Light of Memory, surveying 23 works and work groups from 1996 to 2022, with a focus on the Indian Cycle. In its 2023 annual report, the museum reported acquisitions including the LED mosaic installation Transit of Earth (2022) and works from the The ArtistâÂÂs Studio as Encryption Lab cycle of 3D computergraphic prints (2010âÂÂ2022).
Hahn was included in the national group exhibition IMPRESSION 2024/2025 at Kunsthaus Grenchen, where his CFL â Coded Fluorescent Light II â A Video Rebus (2025) was selected as the winning project of the museumâÂÂs international ON AIR open call and presented as a site-specific projection through the buildingâÂÂs front window during the winter months. In 2026, Hahn is also included in Mehr Licht. Video in der Kunst a cooperation between the Kunstmuseum Solothurn with the Aargauer Kunsthaus.
In the context of his recent AI-related work, Visarte Switzerland published HahnâÂÂs contribution on the series Stable Diffusion â Medusa Rising IâÂÂVIII (2023/2024) in 2025.