A Permanent Home in the Mouth of the Sun

Filter Photo is pleased to present A Permanent Home in the Mouth of the Sun, a solo exhibition of work by Hannah Altman.

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?

About the Artist

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 Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas J Watson Library.

On View: June 25 – July 31, 2021

Location: Filter Space | 1821 W Hubbard St, Suite 207

This exhibition was partially sponsored by The Illinois Arts Council Agency and a CityArts Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events.