Ana Hoffner. Doubling Past

About

The Bacha Posh Project: An Archive On Drag In Times Of War (2016) constructs portraits, still lives, writings and mirror surfaces from the life and work of the Surrealist artist Aziza Mehran Ahmad. Based on retrospective embodiments The Bacha Posh Project presents the research of Ahmad with the performative indexes and imagery of gender ambiguous ways of life. From the archive emerges a past as a drag doppelganger of modernity, a past that has not become history (yet).
 
While memory and imagination migrates in The Bacha Posh Project from one body to the other as a trace of co-affects, the video installation After The Transformation (2013) proposes queer interruptions of history as an artistic strategy. The work relates a double transformation -gender transformation and the transformations after 1989. Its protagonist is a voice that is remembered in a body that previously did not know of it: A memory that makes possible the appropriation of another time.

Text: Suza Husse

Doubling Past is Ana Hoffner’s first solo exhibition in Berlin. A project of District funded by Bundeskanzleramt Österreich.