Plastic Bags, 2014—15

The photo series “Plastic Bags” shows the multiform variations of an omnipresent object: the plain, monochrome shopping bag. Collected by the artist on countless wanderings through Berlin’s urban landscape, the depicted plastic bags open up a microcosm that we usually pay no attention to, although it unfolds before our very eyes. Standardised bags – exposed to the effects of weather, traffic, and environment – evolve into individual entities, exhibiting an impressive wealth of forms and a surprising aesthetics.

The way of staging the bags is a reference to the scientific display of animal and plant species against a white background. Thereby Hahn takes an approach that is, in a metaphorical sense, archaeological. Like a naturalist, he explores the inconspicuous strata of his urban environment and finds eloquent evidence of the forces at work within it. Under the influences of the environment, the material experiences a “potential explosion of every form”, reflecting “the dynamics of the living”, as the French philosopher Catherine Malabou has aptly put it in her accompanying text for the catalogue to Hahn’s photo series (Draussen Dehors Outside, published by Vexer Verlag in 2015).