Hannah Hch

Assembled Worlds
A groundbreaking, richly-illustrated book on Hannah Hchs montages in the context of film and the visual culture of Modernism.

Hannah Hch (18891978) moved between differing worlds: as an editorial assistant with a major Berlin-based magazine publisher, and as the only woman who could hold her own in the German capitals vibrant Dada scene of the 1920s. Hch broke with the traditions of representation and vision. Her works dissected a world marked by the catastrophe of the Great War and an intense consumer culture, and reassembled it in revolutionary, poetic, and often ironic ways. Hch kept to her artistic means and her poetic-radical imagination, shimmering between social observation and dream world, even in the post-WWII period. Scissors and glue were the weapons of her art of montage, of which she was a co-inventor.
Cutting and montage also shaped film, still a new medium in the 1920s, which strongly influenced Hch