Archive of work by graduates from the renowned MFA Programme at GSA

Hannah Ellul

Frequently employing culled artefacts and found footage, I work predominantly in film and video and am interested in what you could call – in fittingly plagiarised terms – the ruptured psychogeography of the image, in its mute ambiguities and political deployments, in lost radicalisms and the undead.

My most recent work is the result of a period of reflection on an act of holding public figures to account. The ways in which pageantry preserves and distorts historical memory as it seeks to instil civic pride has been of interest here, through the prism of the complex dynamics of one particular local tradition. Themes emerge of mob rule and the public humiliation of authority figures, and the question is raised of to what extent such unsettling forces remain latent in the amusing pantomime which is enacted today. The works imagine a recasting of the pantomime as a ludicrous performance where an impossible demand asserts itself in earnest.