sanna@sannahelenaberger.com

Sanna Helena Berger works with site and situation-specific installations with critical agency and auto-biographic transparency. Her auto-didactic narrative exists as both commentary on and reflection of the situation in which her work is exhibited and experienced. A reflexive discipline which perspectives the established tastes, norms and mass-cultural control of the art world and industry. Through her minimal aesthetic, via a maximalist auto-biographical narrative, Berger's vernacular seeks to demystify her practice and production of art by sharing personal circumstances. She considers the problematics of the presence-economy of the art world and its expectations, conditions and economic interdependencies. She utilises strategies which prompt reflection on how we assign meaning to objects and their maker and our understanding of their value and worth. And strategically investigate how the fine arts institutions and industry assign this value according to context, representation and trends. Part post-institutional critique, part personal perspective - Her material installations, readymades and un-readymades are phenomenological explorations of the formal art object through the repositioning of the domestic one, opposing decorative arts without context. Her performances deliver monologues, which through a dramaturgy of criticism discourses not only the subject of art, but is the discourse of her art - as art. Her installations deliver the same density of discourse with a site-specificity which extends to the situation where installations and performative objects as collaborators reflect the work’s surrounding circumstances.

‘Sanna Helena Berger creates situations that provoke and intensifies the alternation between scrutinising and coming under scrutiny that signifies our interaction with art. Berger effectively destabilises flows of real social interaction in a series of explorations into how behaviour is conditioned by our surroundings, and how in turn these mechanisms can be deployed for artistic purposes. Berger’s interventions enlarge and skew the familiar into subtly caricatured forms, inviting detachment. Yet, despite their stagedness, these performances and arrangements also bleed out into the space they occupy together with their audience, making participation compulsory.’
- Stian Gabrielsen, Editor, Kunstkritikk

Berger’s work is an aesthetic and intellectual structure driven by autodidacticism and material pragmatism. Often beginning as a text, her installations variate quotidian experience reformulating power relationships and ideas of value through situations and objects. While Sanna may not refer to herself as a director, I find it helpful to think about the diversity of her practice as a directorial strategy, particularly in her management and orchestration of meaning and form.
- Alexandra Symons Sutcliffe, independent curator / writer, Mousse Magazine

Portfolio
Soon -
Tell me you belong, Shahin Zarinbal, November 30, 2023 — January 20, 2024 (group)
Unruly Analysis (live performance), Jennifee-See Alternate, Den Frie, Copenhagen 2nd December (group)
Working title (live performance), Art on Air, Cashmere Radio, Berlin, 11th December

2023
Post-mother-ism, amatter, Berlin
Postural Fatigue, Baerum Kunsthall, Norway
Rational Display, Galerija Miroslav Kraljević, Zagreb, June *solo
Role (Play), Močvara Gallery, Zagreb, June *solo
CONCRETE ARGUMENTS, Shahin Zarinbal, Berlin, May *solo
Represäntation, Waf Galerie, Vienna, February
Minor Variations, Skånes Konstförening, Malmö, March

2022
Der Ganz Normale Luxus der Zunge, Kunsthalle Bremerhaven
XS, Spazio ORR, Brescia, Italy *solo
Ego & Orchestra, Hosêk Contemporary, Berlin *solo
A text about failure, amatter, Cittipunkt, Berlin
Der Ganz Normale Luxus, Neu Workshop, Hamburg
A text about failure, Höjden, Stockholm

2021
Persona Sonata, Lament.tv, Berlin *solo
Im dialog, w. Aline Sophie Rainer, Kunstverein Kärnten, Austria


2020 Parallels, Cell Project Space, London

2019
An ode to labour, 1.1 Basel, Switzerland
Oyster, PiK – Projektraum im Kunstwerk, Cologne
Nome d'us, Shore, Vienna
SALE, PS120, Berlin *solo

2018
A stock-take, Super, Berlin *solo
A smile-strike, Index, The Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm
Intermission, Delfi, Malmö
A sale, Brussels Art Weekend, Super, Brussels *solo

2017 (selection)
Vienna, Cordova, Vienna *solo
Vienna,Cordova, Barcelona *solo
Maybe there is a substitute for exhibiting, Minibar, Stockholm
Arbetstitel (offentligt verk), Delfi, Malmö *solo

2016 (selection)
Agency (properties of pseudo-public spaces as a prelude), Sorbus, Helsinki *solo
Agency, Kulturforum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, November
A sequence which corresponds, Union Gallery, London *solo
The edge must be scalloped, Diorama, Oslo *solo
Domestic Manifesto, Modern Museum, Stockholm
The body as function, Shanaynay, Paris

Selected Sound
The Removal of the artist and Minor Variatons, life performance, Mocvara Gallery, 2023
Soundtrack, live performance with glasses, Waf Galerie, Vienna, 2023
Minor Variations, live performance w. Flute and glasses, Skånes Konstförening, 2023
Orchestra, live performance with glasses, Hosêk Contemporary, Berlin, 2022
Persona Sonata, live performance with glasses, Lament.tv, Berlin, 2021
Persona Sonata, glasses composition with dialogue, Xplusx, Cashmere Radio, Berlin, 2021
A movement, Album, Cherche Encore, London, 2021
Texte Contact, text, sound piece w Axelle Stiefel, Joyfully Waiting, Switzerland, 2021
Vestige, Sound piece, TLTRPreß, Berlin, 2020
Mahnmal, sound installation, Le Bourgeois / 3236rls, London, 2019
An introduction to modular synthesis, live performance, Spektrum, Berlin, 2017

Selected Published works
Concrete Arguments, Verlag Ida Neustadt Co-published with Shahin Zarinbal
Feuilles Volantes by vorstellen.network at Sculpture Garden Biennale, Geneva, 2022
Der ganz normale luxus, Zirka, Hamburg / Yvonne Lambert, Paris, 2022
DEARS magazine, w Axelle Stiefel, Zürich, 2021
Artist Network Theory Supported by Swiss Art Prize, 2020
Eva Hesse Foundation publication, NY, 2018
Domestic Manifesto, Las Injurias, Caracas, Venezuela, 2016, Printed Matter, NY

Artist Residencies by invitation
Sorbus Galleria with solo exhibition, Helsinki, October, 2016
Union Gallery with solo exhibition, London, April/May, 2016
Jupiter Woods with solo exhibition, London, October, 2015
Rupert with solo exhibition, Vilnius, September, 2015

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