BIO
Allegra Hangen (b. 1992, USA) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Mexico City. Working across experimental video, installation, sound, sculpture, photography, and poetry, she is drawn to systems that shape culture and perception: architecture, archives, infrastructures, images, language.
Her practice often includes forms of visual rupture, like erasure and glitch, to reveal moments of instability and power within these systems. Through industrial and domestic materials, archives, and alternative photographic processes, Hangen offers poetic revisions of history and speculative futures.
Hangen has exhibited internationally at institutions and artist-run spaces, including the Giardini della Biennale in Venice, The Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington in Virginia, Centro Fotográfico Manuel Álvarez Bravo in Oaxaca, Salón Silicón in Mexico City and Galería Hilario Galguera in Mexico City.
STATEMENT
At the core of my practice is a concern around control–both my fascination with it as well as my distrust in it; specifically, the way control appears in the systems of our public and private lives. My practice tends to confront and visually question these systems–architecture, urban infrastructures, mass media, politics–through a mix of disciplines that often culminates in multimedia installations.
Stemming from research-based practices and archival methods, my work offers layers of personal/cultural histories. I intervene images and text as a way to add my small grain of sand into the large machinery of image- and language-based systems.
Through industrial materials like aluminum, acrylic, concrete, and plaster, I emulate fragments of urban infrastructure, architecture, and archeological objects. And through domestic materials like curtains, mirrors, and television monitors, I study what these objects say about our relationship to the built and affective worlds around us.
I’m currently exploring coding as a technique to find where sound and image meet in the hydraulic infrastructure of Mexico City.
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