Cinema of exhibition? Autobiographical cinema? Never mind the definitions, a new kind of cinema is being invented by Clarisse Hahn, who mixes genres. (…) Her camera is like an extension of her body in the way she negotiates the world. But wether she is exploring her own family or evoking a protesting tribe across the ocean, it’s all a matter of fiddling the right distance.

Catherine Millet. Clarisse Hahn: People on the line. Art press, septembre 2012

Clarisse Hahn questions the codes associated with the “being-together”. Not only by filming communities the rites of which she examines in details, but by disrupting the contemplator/contemplated relation. (…) Clarisse Hahn has been studying the body in its intimate and social dimension. (…) She directly disrupts her shows, confronting violent scenes while establishing emotional relations with her protagonists. Although her body is rarely involved, she does not cease to “imperil her value system”. An involvement that allows a more immediate freeing of speech. With her way of approaching reality, she explores a new route: a route that nevertheless remains truly documentary, although it appears to be pushed to its outer limits, because it welcomes its transgressions. (…) Through her balancing act on the borderline by which she upsets our relation to the world, the protocols of contemporary art (the ambulatory habits) and the documentary devices (which she freely rearranges), she takes part in bringing about the necessary changes in the genres without ever confusing them.

Prisons
2011
colour video 4:3
Duration: 12 minutes

Two young women used their own body as war weapon, by participating in a hunger strike in the Turkish prisons in the year 2000. This hunger strike was repressed in a bloody way by the army. Between portraits and archives images, a reflection on the resistance and the sacrifice of the individual in front of the violence of the State.