Circolo UltraFiorucci and The Community are honored to present In Our Real Life, the latest solo exhibition by Jason Hendrik Hansma (b. 1988, Lahore; based in Rotterdam/Berlin). Hansma’s work dwells between language and silence, between presence and absence. Here, the gallery becomes a liminal frame: a site of unfolding rather than declaration.
At this moment of global urgency, In Our Real Life does not declaim apocalypse, but leans into a crisis rendered through poetry and resonance. The show evokes fire, ash, embers, and time as vessels for transformation — not to prophesy the end, but to open space for reflection and possibility.
The installation centers on a large-scale film installation In Our Real Life (Embers), compiled from collected amateur wildfire footage gathered over years, slowed, recompiled, and rendered ambient with a soundtrack by Ssaliva. The series of six new wall-spanning paintings, made with Milanese master gilders, echo the flickering embers in abstraction. Red-hued light filters through the gallery, silver-leaf residue dusts the dark floor, transforming the space into a suspended threshold. Across this carefully calibrated field, Hansma invites a temporality of hope: to stop, breathe, dwell in emergence — and perhaps to feel how crisis and possibility entwine.
Hansma’s work explores the in-between, the liminal, and the nearly articulate. Drawing from a wide range of references and materials, Hansma’s work deals with standards, architectural, cultural, and physical, along with how works are made outside of standardized norms. For Hansma, a photograph might be created over months, an entire exhibition might happen in ‘transitional spaces’ such as hallways, doorways, or window sills. A hand-stitched curtain slows down an exhibition’s motion, providing a soft cut moved by a slight breeze from outside air or a film focusing on the moment a wave crashes into architecture. Amateur videos of embers recorded from bushfires are cut to chopped and screwed, and textiles from the artist’s ancestors are refolded and formed into new painterly landscapes. In the work, language (and the loss of language) plays a key role in moving through the politics of aesthetics to reconsider the means we use to locate ourselves through and with each other.
Exhibitions, performances, readings, and screenings have been included at the Grand Palais, UNESCO, Bauhaus, Dessau, Maison van Doesburg, KADIST, Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA, Art Basel Hong Kong’s Satellite Program, Eye Filmmuseum, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius, Centre Georges Pompidou, Parc Saint-Léger Centre d’art Contemporain, Centre International d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière, Center For Contemporary Art Futura, Jan van Eyck and De Appel among others.
Jason Hendrik Hansma has been a tutor at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, the Master Program at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK), Master of Artistic Research at the University of Amsterdam, Brno University of Technology Faculty of Fine Arts, Artez, St. Joost School of Art & Design, Sandberg Instituut and was a Rietveld/Sandberg research fellow. Jason is also an advisor to the Mondriaan Fonds (Dutch National Visual Arts Foundation) committee.
Hansma is co-director and co-curator of Shimmer (along with curator Eloise Sweetman), an exhibition space and curatorial studio. Shimmer has collaborated with and shown over 200 practices such as stanley brouwn, Raqs Media Collective, Ellen Gallagher, Charlotte Posenenske, Theo van Doesburg, Marcel Duchamp, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Lawrence Weiner, amongst others.
