A Permanent Home in the Mouth of the Sun

Works by Hannah Altman

August 14 – September 10, 2021
Associated Artists of Pittsburgh Exhibition Space
100 43rd St. Unit 107
Pittsburgh, PA 15201

A Permanent Home in the Mouth of the Sun explores Jewish diaspora, world building, and sacred time through photographic narratives that build from interpreted ritual and motifs in Yiddish folklore. Judaic stories often consider the polarity of exile; with one hand we tend to ancestral wounds that compel the notion to shield and assimilate, with the other we knead an ancestral resilience that allows us to continually revisit actions, places, and objects as they fit into new spaces of care and translation. The Jewish ritualization of time is similarly elastic. Through repeated cycles of practice sanctified by the setting sun, the past weaves through the arteries of the present, encouraging photographs born from Jewish memories to perform time in open-ended worlds. To approach an image in this way is not only to ask what it looks like but asks: what does it remember like?

A Permanent Home in the Mouth of the Sun: Works by Hannah Altman

Artist Bio

Hannah Altman is a Jewish-American artist from New Jersey. She holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Through photographic based media, her work interprets relationships between gestures, the body, lineage, and interior space. 

She has recently exhibited with the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Blue Sky Gallery, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, and Photoville Festival. Her work has been featured in publications such as Vanity Fair, Carnegie Museum of Art Storyboard, Huffington Post, New York Times, Fotoroom, Cosmopolitan, i-D, and British Journal of Photography. She was included in the 2020 Critical Mass and Lenscratch Student Prize Finalists and in the Silver Eye Center For Photography’s 2021 Silver List. 

She has delivered lectures on her work and research across the country, including Yale University and the Society for Photographic Education National Conference. Her first monograph, Kavana, published by Kris Graves Projects, is in the permanent collection of the MoMa and Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas J Watson libraries.