Eric Hattan
Born in 1953.
He lives and works between Basel and Paris, travelling frequently between the two cities. His artistic enquiry is characterised by a questioning of places and the ordering of everyday life, with displacement occupying a central position in his work.
Video, often made with a camcorder, is a recurring medium: Hattan turns his gaze towards events in urban space and, through recording, compiles a kind of visual notebook of fragmented moments. Alongside recording, his practice involves the reorganisation of objects—clothing, furniture, plinths, or screens—which plays a formal and conceptual role in his work. He primarily produces temporary interventions in public space that divert familiar images; among the documented works is Jet d’OH!
(2000), a rubbish bin fitted with a triggering mechanism (120 × 40 cm), listed as belonging to the artist.
His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions, notably Béton liquide (2000/2001), presented at the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau and at MAMCO in Geneva. In 2009, he was granted a carte blanche at the Musée d'art contemporain du Val-de-Marne (MAC/VAL) in Vitry-sur-Seine. Collaborations and duo presentations also form part of his career: Kennen sie DIE?
with Werner Reiterer at Kunsthaus Baselland (Muttenz) in 2003, and What About Sunday? with Silvia Bächli at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, in 2013. A monograph bringing together his works from 1979 to 2015 was published in 2016 (Anthony Spira and Lutz Eitel, eds., Holzwarth Publications), and he received the City of Basel Art Prize (Kulturpreis der Stadt Basel) in 2016.