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.

The Protestants
2005
B & W photography, 60 x 45 cm.
This series of photos is based on portraits stemming of the family albums of people filmed in the video THE PROTESTANTS, who live among the portraits of their forefathers, making it constantly reference. We feel even today in their body the rigidity of these portraits-models. The cropping and the increase of photos toughens the intention of the models: pose by establishing the biggest possible distance with the interiority. Do not let perceive any detail which could allow an observer to place the individual except the role which he tries to embody: that of the austere Protestant bourgeois, and when one needs it, that of the disciplined military officer. It is an ideal of beauty that rhymes with sobriety and self-control.

The photography questions this body which it simultaneously reveals and masks. Arms cross themselves on the trunk, the jacket of the suit is stiffened in the point to look like a shell. The body becomes border. The body is the center of the relation to the other one, but it is positionned as an obstacle, a wall defender. It is the wall itself which lets suppose to the observer the fragilities and the weakness it tries to mask.