H a n n a h   S t a r k e y

b. 1971, Belfast, Northern Ireland
Lives and works in London, UK

Hannah Starkey Untitled - January 2000 2000 C-print The Carol and Arthur Goldberg Collection Courtesy Maureen Paley Interim Art, London

Hannah Starkey’s filmic tableaux recall the dramatic yet measured tensions of Alfred Hitchcock or Edward Hopper. Working between reality and fiction with the mise-en-scène, Starkey reconstructs real people and observed situations using a vocabulary of codes and signs culled from contemporary urban culture. The everyday locations are fragments of a generic urban environment, while the fictional characters in Starkey’s pictures oscillate between collective (social, political, economic, cultural or geographic) signifiers and stereotypes of individual personalities. These figures are more often than not women – although there is a sense that, as Starkey says, you can make a picture of women that is not necessarily about women.

The figures in her photographs don’t do much; they wait in cafés, linger in a video rental store, stare out of windows on the bus. Isolated by their own thoughts, these figures are intermittently present and remote from their immediate surroundings, caught up by dramas taking place elsewhere. Starkey’s instinct for narrative animates the non-events she depicts. In the surreal pink neon glow of a video store, beneath a sharply receding grid of flat ceiling lights, three girls, all dressed in fashionable ankle length quilted coats, two black and one white, stand browsing the shelves in a video store. In this light, their coats lend them the faintest semblance of Star Wars warriors. In another scene, a woman sits alone at a café table next to a large hand-painted mural of a shoal of koi carp. Her long gray hair echoes the movement of the fish on the wall, linking the two formally and psychologically. Starkey’s reflexive engagement with the image exposes the processes of repetition inextricably linked to the construction of identity in image culture, while her use of compositional devices within the image creates a highly charged social space that directly implicates the viewer in the processes of subjectivation.

Selected Solo Exhibitions
2000 Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland. Progetto, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy. 1999 Nederlands Foto Institut, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK. Galleria Raucci/Santamaria, Naples, Italy. 1995 Hannah Starkey, Scottish Homes, Stills Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Hannah Starkey Untitled - March 2002 2002 C-print The Speyer Family Collection, New York Courtesy Maureen Paley Interim Art, London

Selected Group Exhibitions
2002 The St. James Group Ltd Photography Prize 2002, Flowers East, London, UK. Coming of Age, The New Art Gallery, Walsall, UK. Landscape, Saatchi Gallery @ 30 Underwood Street, London, UK. 2001 Melancholy, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, UK. Telling Tales: Narrative Impulses in Recent Art, Tate Liverpool, UK. No World Without You, Reflections of Identity in New British Art, Herzliya Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel. Instant City, Museo Pecci, Prato, Italy. Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize, The Photographers’ Gallery, London, UK. 2000 Suspendidos, Centro de Fotografía, Universidad de Salamanca, Spain. 1999 Clues, Monte Video, Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 3rd International Tokyo Photo Bienale, Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo, Japan. 1998 Sightings, New Photographic Art, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK. Modern Narratives: The Domestic and the Social, Artsway, London, UK. 1997 John Kobal Foundation, National Portrait Gallery, London, UK.

Selected Bibliography
Beccaria, Marcella, A Project for the Castle, Hannah Starkey, exh.cat. (Castello di Rivoli: Turin, Italy, 2000)
Bishop, Claire, “Hannah Starkey, Quietly Loaded Moments,” Flash Art v.32 no.207 (Summer 1999): 124-25
Charlesworth, JJ, “Reality Check,” Art Monthly no.247 (Jun. 2001): 1-5
Glennie, Sarah & Val Williams, Hannah Starkey (Irish Museum of Modern Art: Dublin, Ireland, 2000)
Glover, Michael, ”Hannah Starkey,” Art News v.99 no.9 (Oct. 2000): 188
Güner, Fisun, “Hannah Starkey, Maureen Paley Interim Art,” Modern Painters v.15 no.3 (Autumn 2002): 141
Masterson, Piers, “Hannah Starkey: Interim Art,” Creative Camera no.355 (Dec. 98/Jan. 99): 40
Schwabsky, Barry, “Openings: Hannah Starkey,” Artforum International v.37 no.1 (Sep. 1998): 142-43
Tebbs, Paul, “Amongst Women,” Source no.18 (Winter 1998): http://www.source.ie/is17revamowom.html
Williams, Val, “Hannah and Her Sitters,” British Journal of Photography no.7158 (Jan. 14, 1998): 12-14

Artists

Return to Sodium Dreams home page