Stanya Kahn

Stanya Kahn (b. 1968) is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in video with a practice that includes drawing, sound, writing, performance, and sculpture/installation. Humor, pathos, and the uncanny emerge as central modes in a hybrid media practice that seeks to re-work relationships between fiction and document, the real and the hyper-real, and narrative time and the synchronic time of impulse. In a long-term investigation of how rhetoric gains and loses power, Kahn’s projects often situate language in the foreground of works that are dialectically driven by the demands of the body. Recent solo exhibitions include shows at the New Museum, New York, USA; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, USA; Weiss Berlin, Berlin, Germany; and Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK.

Kahn is also a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow in Film/Video. Select group exhibitions include the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA; the New Museum, New York, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, USA; Fernley Astrup, Oslo, Norway; and The California Biennial, California, USA. Her collaborative work with Harry Dodge has shown at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York, USA; the Whitney Biennial 2008, New York, USA;  Sundance Film Festival, Utah, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; and ZKM, Karlsrüh, Germany, among others. She was a contributing writer and actor in feature film By Hook or By Crook. Her writings and drawings appear in multiple publications including Die Laughing (2nd Cannons), Moving Image (MIT Press), It's Cool, I'm Good (Cornerhouse), and Abstract Video (UC Press).