Stanya Kahn is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in film/video with a practice that includes ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture/installation, sound, and writing. She foregrounds humor, pathos and the uncanny to re-work relationships between fiction and document, the real and the hyper-real, narrative time and the synchronic time of impulse. Her sculptural works and paintings often utilize anthropomorphic characters, talking animals and usually inanimate objects, using absurdist imagery to speak to real-life global anxieties and traumas.
Kahn’s feature-length work, Stand in the Stream (2011-2017), is an ambient digital film shot on multiple camera formats over the course of six years. The film’s footage (all shot by Kahn or screen-recorded by Kahn in real-time) moves globally and locally through the wild, the streets, the home, and online. The resulting work is a visceral, phenomenological reflection of life, power, and uprising in late capitalism. Tracing the decline of her mother into dementia and the birth and growing up of her now young adult son against a backdrop of evolving technology and increasing violence in the face of uprisings against police violence and inequality, Stand in the Stream affirms the political in the personal and the personal in collective resistance. No Go Backs (2020), shot on 16mm film, then transferred and edited digitally, follows two teenage boys as they escape the city for the wild. The boys, while unprepared and vulnerable, are strong in their commitment to working together. No Go Backs posits a possible future made manifest by the resistance documented in Stand in the Stream, the immediate need and possibility to not only imagine but create a new world. Created before the global pandemic, No Go Backs presaged the psychological impact of the pandemic and alluded to the climate catastrophes that have accelerated in the last few years.
Stanya Kahn was born in 1968 in San Francisco and lives and works in Los Angeles. She graduated from Bard College’s Milton Avery School of the Arts with an MFA in 2003. Recent solo exhibitions include shows at Institute for Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Wexner Center for the Arts, MoMA, PS1, New Museum, NY, British Film Institute, London Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Marlborough Chelsea, NY, Weiss Berlin, The Pit, LA, Cornerhouse/Manchester, UK. Select group exhibitions include Weslyan Art Gallery, the Walker Art Center, CAM, St. Louis, the Gwanju Biennial (’18), Hammer Museum, New Museum, MOCA, SD, Fernley Astrup, Norway, Transmediale, The California Biennial (’10). Her collaborative work with Harry Dodge has shown at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, NY, the Whitney Biennial (08), Sundance Film Festival, MOCA, LA, MoMA, NY, ZKM, Karlsrüh, among others. Kahn was a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow in Film/Video. She was a contributing writer and actor in feature film By Hook or By Crook. Her writings and drawings appear in multiple publications including Die Laughing (2nd Cannons), Moving Image (MIT Press), It’s Cool, I’m Good (Cornerhouse), and Abstract Video (UC Press.) Her work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum, MoMA, NY, LACMA, the Walker Art Museum and among others.
- 1968
- 2003
- 1992
Selected Solo and Two Person Exhibitions
- 2023
- 2022
- 2020-2021
- 2020
- 2018
- 2017
- 2016
- 2015
- 2014
- 2013
- 2012
- 2011
- 2010
- 2008
- 2007
- 2006
Selected Group Exhibitions
- 2024
- 2023
- 2020
- 2019-2020
- 2019
- 2018
- 2017
- 2016
- 2015
- 2014
- 2012
- 2011
- 2010
- 2009
- 2008
- 2007
- 2006
- 2005
- 2004
- 2003
Performances
- 2016
- 2006
- 2005
- 2004
- 2003
- 2002
- 2001
- 2000
- 1999
- 1998
- 1997
- 1996
- 1987-1995
Video Screenings
- 2023
- 2020
- 2018
- 2017
- 2016
- 2015
- 2013
- 2002
- 2001
Bibliography
- 2024
- 2023
- 2022
- 2021
- 2020
- 2019
- 2018
- 2017
- 2016
- 2015
- 2014
- 2013
- 2012
- 2011
- 2010
- 2009
- 2008
- 2007
- 2006
- 2005
- 2004
- 2003
- 2002
- 2001
- 2000
- 1999
- 1998
- 1997
- 1996
- 1995
- 1994
Group Exhibition Catalogues and Books
- 2017
- 2015
- 2010
- 2007
- 2002
- 2000
- 1999
- 1998
- 1995
Awards, Grants and Fellowships
- 2021
- 2015
- 2014
- 2013
- 2012
- 2011
- 2010
- 2009
- 2008
- 2007
- 2006
- 2004