Stanya Kahn is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in film/video with a practice that includes drawing, painting, sculpture/installation, sound and writing. Humor, pathos and the uncanny are central to a hybrid media practice that seeks to re-work relationships between fiction and document, the real and the hyper-real, narrative time and the synchronic time of impulse. In a long-term investigation of how rhetoric gains and loses power, Kahn’s projects often situate language in the foreground of works that are dialectically driven by the demands and of the body. Sometimes language falls away altogether.

Recent solo exhibitions include shows at Institute for Contemporary Art/Los Angeles, The Wexner Center for the Arts, MoMA/PS1, New Museum/NY, British Film Institute/London Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Marlborough Chelsea/NY, Weiss Berlin, The Pit/LA, Cornerhouse/Manchester, UK. Select group exhibitions include Weslyan Art Gallery, the Walker Art Center, CAM/St. Louis, the Gwanju Biennial (’18), Hammer Museum, New Museum, MOCA/SD, Fernley Astrup/Norway, Transmediale, The California Biennial (’10). Her collaborative work with Harry Dodge has shown at Elizabeth Dee Gallery/NY, the Whitney Biennial (08), Sundance Film Festival, MOCA/LA, MoMA/NY, ZKM/Karlsrüh, among others. Kahn was a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow in Film/Video. She was a contributing writer and actor in feature film By Hook or By Crook. Her writings and drawings appear in multiple publications including Die Laughing (2nd Cannons), Moving Image (MIT Press), It’s Cool, I’m Good (Cornerhouse), and Abstract Video (UC Press.) Her work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum, MoMA/NY, LACMA, the Walker Art Museum and among others.