The practice of the young Danish artist Nanna Elvin Hansen moves in the gray between art, research, and grassroots activism. Building audio and film projects through collaborative processes, her works unveil how structural violence and historical inequality impact human rights and material extraction, as well as human and non-human migration, and displacement. 

For her first grand-scale institutional show, Hansen has created the major new film and sound installation Groundings, collaborating with sound artist Eliza Bożek, among others. Based on long-term research on the quartzite quarry at the Giemaš mountain in the Sápmi region of northern Norway, Hansen’s investigation digs into questions of the manmade structures that control Earth’s raw materials and ground—hence the title Groundings. How technology amplifies the mapping, analysis, extraction, and profitability of natural resources and how the core resources employed in these new technologies and shifting geopolitics are the Earth’s raw materials themselves (just think of the chip in your smartphone).

Nanna Elvin Hansen (b. 1989, Aarhus) is an artist and filmmaker, and graduate of the School of Media Arts at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2021). In 2015, she co-founded the collective project The Bridge Radio. Recently her film Moving Mountains, created with Norwegian artist Ase Brunborg Lie, premiered at CPH:DOX in 2023, and the city walk Voices in the Shadow of Monuments, a collaborative project together with Barly Tshibanda and Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, among others, was awarded one of the annual exhibition awards by the Danish Art Foundation in 2022.