Beatrice Hansson lives and works in Stockholm and partly in Cisternino, Puglia’s region, Italy. She works with exhibition activities and in public contexts with art or in projects with design in collaboration with architects and landscape architects. In the her artistic production she works with stories, in installations, with sculpture and image in different materials, and in early works also with text and video / film. Several works and exhibitions have been about time, doing, repetition and an interest in a process. Nowadays it is also a search for material that can itself have a statement, often mass-produced, everyday material that has a function.
Steel bars, patterned plywood, thread, needle, frigolite, glass. It may be a common artistic practice but for her it has laws and restrictions that are in some ways quite stringent. First. Then she let the concept control how strict it should be. In the end it turns out that everything is quite open as the search for meaning is greater, a strong existential need. Her sculptural works can have several functions, not only to look at, but also to climb in, to be in with your body. The physical experience and experience is another way of understanding sculpture. Her works therefore work well in environments for children and young people. Depending on their complexity, they can challenge those who climb to develop both strength and balance. They have also a function as a social sculpture, being in, hanging in. Together.
In the recent exhibition titled ” Geo-Graphies: Identity rituals and fragile ecosystems”, in Lecce (Italy), she makes a reference to the space hosting the event with the installation titled “The sister of San Sebastiano”. Works (ink on wooden panels) are inspired by the women who lived and worked in the convent adjacent to the Church of San Sebastiano. Women, unknown and from a dubious past … think about the “repentant”, in the preface on the history of the Palmieri’s Foundation. Women, subjected to the rigid religious laws of the time, subordinated to live a monastic life, where the individual story is immersed in the solitude of a cloistered life and ideas of rigorous purity. The hair of these women is gathered by a veil and the body by a dress that hides beauty. The artist wanted to honor and ennoble the memory of these women, with a symbolic and visible gesture: the hair. They take forms and symmetries with ink on the four wooden panels and come out of their aura of forced personal privacy, to enter contemporary history, also recalling another identity issue – still present in some places in the Middle East or where faith is practiced of Islam – where the severity of the abaya, the long black tunic imposed on Arab women and the patriarchal power prevents their access to society. Last group show: 2020 – ” Geo-Graphies: Identity rituals and fragile ecosystems”, Curated by Dores Sacquegna, Fondazione Palmieri, Lecce, Italy
She deals with installations and public art with urban and landscape architectural and sculptural projects. See some examples in the slideshow
