Bio

Nanna Hänninen (*1973 in Rovaniemi, Finland) lives and works in Kuopio, Finland.
She graduated from Aalto University School of Art and Design in 2002. In 2023, she received a
5-year artist grant from the National Council for Photographic Art in Finland for the second time. Her work has been shown internationally and extensively in the Nordic region, such as at Serlachius Museum (Mäntta, FI), Fotomuseum Winterthur (CH), Stenersen Museum (Oslo), EMMA - Espoo Museum of Modern Art (FI), Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), Kulturhuset (Stockholm), Nordic Biennial for Contemporary Art (Gothenburg, SE), Kunstverein Schwerte (DE), and Kiasma (Helsinki), as well as the Discovery Awards exhibitions in Arles.

Nanna Hänninen focuses on environmental issues affecting global communities, warning of a rapidly approaching future. Her photo-based work challenges our views on climate change by exploring its gradual effects on our lives. By altering her initial subject matter, she creates a personal response to shared realities, blurring the lines between the figurative and the abstract. Her work delves into themes such as memory processing, the intrinsic sense of isolation, and their interplay in shaping a collective, universal experience. Throughout her artistic career, she has consistently examined how we mentally construct space through emotions, anxieties, and external threats, investigating how memory serves as a bridge to understanding the future. Her images remain open to visual interpretation, compelling viewers to choose between the object and its symbolic reference. The fragile yet poetic dimension of her work emerges from this interplay between reality and fiction—a space where the imagery can feel like a dream or, at times, a nightmare.

nanna hänninen
@nannahanninen

Painted Desert
Project Statement

In her series Painted Desert, Hänninen travels through Joshua Tree National Park, Monument Valley, and Saguaro National Park in Arizona, delib­erately choosing locations most affected by drought. Through her documentation of these natural surroundings, she reflects on our relationship with landscape and nature. Her process begins with black-and-white photographs that vividly capture the stark impacts of change on desert landscapes. As one of the environments most sensitive to the ever-changing cli­mate, volatile fluctuations place desert life in danger of extinc­tion, with rising temperatures and droughts posing increasing threats. By staining the prints and intervening with paint, Hän­ninen transforms the original im­ages, creating a deeply personal response to these vanishing land­scapes. Her painterly interventions breathe life and color back into the drought-stricken deserts, restoring what has been lost and symbol­izing the fragility of these endan­gered environments as human presence encroaches upon them.