Since the late 1970s, Alexander Hahn has transformed episodes from his personal biography—as well as references to history and science—into art, foregrounding psyche, memory, and dream as central points of orientation. In her chapter
Miniature and Series: The Re-invention of the Epistolary Form in the Work of Alexander Hahn, Cathie Payne analyses Hahn’s video “miniatures” as a conceptual and aesthetic strategy for capturing transient, ephemeral interactions, discussing them as an intimate and reflective mode of practice (including in relation to accelerated urban density and a changing anthropogenic worldview). In one of his earliest solo presentations, Hahn showed the performance and installation
Wege – Ways: first at Galerie Apropos (Lucerne) in 1978, later at Galerie Toni Gerber (Bern) in 1980, and at 626 Broadway (New York) in 1981. Reviewing the Bern presentation, Res Ingold described the two-day staging in a private house at Schänzlihalde, featuring a salt-covered floor, a wire network under the ceiling, and hanging threads that Hahn lit one after another, so that “dozens of small fires” moved through the room; Ingold noted that “the performance lasts a long time. The same action is repeated many times, each time a new path. I am fascinated; a thousand ideas pass through my mind.” Since then, Hahn exhibited his work worldwide in over 20 solo exhibitions and in over 100 group shows and video festivals. In 2007, the Kunstmuseum Solothurn and
Museum der Moderne Salzburg organized a retrospective about his work. The accompanying bilingual catalogue,
Alexander Hahn: Werke/Works 1976–2006, edited by Christoph Vögele, was published by
Kehrer Verlag (Heidelberg). In 2008, the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art presented Hahn’s interactive video projection
Luminous Point (2005) in the two-person exhibition
Room for Thought: Alexander Hahn and Yves Netzhammer.
Luminous Point is an interactive video projection that SFMOMA described as a virtual simulation of Hahn’s Manhattan apartment, functioning as a metaphor for his “mental landscape”. Using a handheld remote control, viewers steer navigate through a game-like labyrinth of digitally constructed rooms and transitional videos derived from photographic and film records, slipping between reality and fantasy, memory and imagination. The accompanying catalogue to the 2007 retrospective refers to
Luminous Point as “archived reminiscence in an interactive memory palace”—a form of mnemonic architecture associated with the classical
art of memory (see
method of loci). In 2022/23, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen presented
Memory of Light – Light of Memory, surveying 23 works and work groups from 1996 to 2022, with a focus on the
Indian Cycle. Hahn was included in the national group exhibition
IMPRESSION 2024/2025 at Kunsthaus Grenchen, where his
CFL – Coded Fluorescent Light II – A Video Rebus (2025) was selected as the winning project of the museum’s international
ON AIR open call and presented as a site-specific projection through the building’s front window during the winter months. In 2026, Hahn is also included in
Mehr Licht. Video in der Kunst a cooperation between the Kunstmuseum Solothurn with the Aargauer Kunsthaus. In the context of his recent AI-related work, Visarte Switzerland published Hahn’s contribution on the series
Stable Diffusion – Medusa Rising I–VIII (2023/2024) in 2025. == Selected exhibitions ==