It would be hard to hand this photobook to someone in a decontextualized state and expect them to understand the modalities of ecstasy and horror that permeate the frames. In the first seventy or eighty percent of the book, figures cavort and twist and are undetermined by a common goal. They are bodies of a specific time and place, but what that registers with is uncertain, and uncertainty is a massive part of the atmosphere in the work. What would a person glean from the work without knowing of the existing collaboration between the authors?

There is a suggestion of a place or a stage, but the fourth wall feels entirely shattered. The POV onstage or from within the group suggests an active shooter, a person recording from within the mist of the flailing bodies in which time is suspended and the viewer cannot be sure of their involvement, whether to embrace the Mise-en-scène or pull away from it as it does feel exclusive and nearly spiritual as though an errant group of whirling dervishes has found a new way of expressing their twirling cacophony of movement into a conduit for something, a force, vaguely approaching nuclear.

A car arrives. Its position is unclear, but it has been noticed. A red web of light now suggests a digital vector across the space. One feels they are being rendered by a contour net of deep red lights, unsure of the mapping; the reaction is slow, lethargic, and without much focus. It is an acceptance, and not much else happens without the acquiescence. The car may idly hum along, but it is also in the process of being scanned darkly.

All of these interactions are the product of choreographer Gisèle Vienne, a noted Austrian and French artist with whom Estelle Hanania has worked previously for their collaboration/book It’s Alive! – À travers l’œuvre de Gisèle Vienne, published by Shelter Press in late 2019. That book was a revelation. Having most of Hanania’s photobooks presented a new way of seeing her as a collaborator with other artists pushing boundaries between the body, contemporary dialectics of phantasmagoric memory, and fantasy.

With Hanania, there has always been an interest in alternate mythologies. The first book I have come across in her oeuvre relating to this fundamental position in her work was Parking Lot Hydra, followed by Glacial Jubilé. Both books look at European folklore through the prism of photography, a photography that focuses on a subject’s abject faculties and beauty. A pull between two worlds in Hanania’s images provides an uncanny relationship to her subject. It is not just the masks and dolls; instead, it is how she animates the subject matter to give them the potential to be read as alive, a word that suggests an oblique animism.

With the new book, there is a continuation of the work found in It’s Alive, but a different atmosphere is present. Though the images could be read like set photography, as mentioned above, what Hanania brings to Vienne’s work is a sense of animism. Whereas It’s Alive worked on the premise of a strange and horror-induced document featuring Vienne’s dolls as protagonists, the atmosphere in This Causes Consciousness to Fracture is more hallucinatory, and the larger format of the book with its gatefold spreads and fine text by Elsa Dorlin suggest a hallucinatory reading of Vienne’s world. It has shifted from a Henry Darger and Morton Bartlett-esque recording to something more in line with Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception mixed with a science fiction-like play of light and ambiance. It is a slightly more refined read of the work as the dolls (some here as well) occupied the reader as much as the sets. Here, the setting takes over and works on repetition, and the lighting induces a Dream Machine-like atmosphere of flicker and burst.

Seeing a more extensive offering of Hanania’s collaboration with Vienne in TCCTF is fantastic. It does justice for both artists to have a slightly more significant book, and the mechanics of the gatefold design do much to make it feel more immersive. It is also paced in a way that suggests cinema and a narrative arc, with exposition and crescendo, followed by a denouement and finish that I find encouraging. I do not know if that follows Vienne’s choreography, as I have never witnessed it, but I suspect it follows some of that structure. All in all, it might be my favorite book from Hanania as her collaborative spirit is visible. However, her images remain her own, a good sign of a healthy working relationship with the publisher and Vienne. How far it can be pursued from here is an interesting question, but for the moment, this is a grand gesture toward the infinite possibilities of reading both Vienne and Hanania. Get it!

Estelle Hanania

This Causes Consciousness to Fracture

Spector Books