Nanna Hänninen

References from the Desert #2, 2025

The installation explores viewing and the viewing experience, and on the other hand, our relationship with nature and the landscape around us. The diorama-like work simulates, through works combining painting and photography and a viewing platform, the viewing situations we experience in various natural sites.

"In Nanna Hänninen's latest works, the photographs alternate between depicting reality and illusion. Rather than being straightforward descriptions of the landscape, they are reflections on pictorial reality. Nanna Hänninen works on original photographic subjects using paint, creating an experience of personalization in the reality that everyone perceives, i.e. the landscape. The landscapes she chooses remind viewers of the fragility of an endangered environment, as humans destroy it accidentally or intentionally.” Persons Projects © 2024

Kuopio-based photographic artist Nanna Hänninen graduated from the University of Industrial Arts in 2002. She has played a central role in the Helsinki School since the late 1990s and is one of the first Finnish photographic artists to work conceptually through photography. Over the past decades, her works have been exhibited in several international galleries and her works are in numerous public and private collections around the world.