HANNA KISCH AND THE RENEGOTIATION OF THE BODY

We meet at Drop Coffee in Södermalm, Stockholm, a café buzzing with Italian voices – usually a good sign when it comes to coffee. Hanna is running a little late and asks me to wait before ordering. When she finally pushes open the chiming door, her appearance is almost theatrical: an oversized vintage fur coat, bright orange hair cut in uneven lengths, and tribal-style jewellery dangling from her ears. At the table, she drops the coat onto the cushioned spindle-back settee and reveals a large belly.

‘Yes! We’re pregnant!’

A moment later, she sits with a matcha latte and describes what it feels like to carry another life inside her body.

‘It’s a completely new bodily experience. I’ve actually never felt this good – it’s like having your best friend with you all the time.’

Listening to her describe a body changing from within, it becomes striking how closely this logic mirrors her artistic practice. In Kisch’s work, bodies and materials rarely remain stable categories. Surfaces mutate, substances shift character, and adornment behaves less like decoration than an additional anatomy.

Kisch frequently combines materials burdened with conflicting associations: latex linked to fetish culture, silicone to prosthetics and medical technologies, industrial glues, synthetic pigments and resin-like coatings. Through layering, casting and binding, these substances lose their familiar identities and begin to resemble unfamiliar forms of tissue, skin or protective membranes. What interests her is not illusion, but the unstable moment when a material slips free from its assigned category: latex begins to resemble flesh and silicone appears strangely organic. Matter enters a state of uncertainty.

A bralette, created for the performer and Hanna’s partner Xirley Harthey Ubilla, clings tightly to the torso like an unfamiliar organ. A glossy silicone surface stretches across the chest in soft bulges and sealed seams, as though the body has grown an additional layer rather than put something on. From a distance, it could almost be mistaken for wet skin. Up close, its artificial logic becomes apparent: slightly translucent, emitting a subtle frictional sound when touched.

As the performer moves, the surface both protects and exposes the anatomy. Rather than concealing the body, it renegotiates how it is perceived. Muscle tension, breath, heat and movement become newly legible through the material’s resistance. The costume does not obscure corporeality; it intensifies it. This attention to the physical motions governs every material decision. Projects often begin with sketches, Kisch explains, but the material ultimately determines the outcome.

‘Would this really be the right fit? Would latex be better? Production has to guide me. I have had to learn that function always comes first and must kill my darlings all the time.’

Materials are never just neutral carriers of an aesthetic; sweat, breathability, friction and temperature determine what a body can endure. Much of her work unfolds in performance contexts where dance must remain possible, breath must circulate, and a voice must carry across a stage. Even the most speculative body remains tethered to a living, sweating and breathing one.

Kisch describes her relationship to materials almost as a compulsion to master the unknown. ‘If I don’t know what something is, I have to learn everything there is to know about it. I have to become friends with it.’

The intimacy she describes is as tactile as it is intellectual. At Konstfack¹, in Ädellabb², she developed a practice in which every material was treated as precious, regardless of origin. One of her earliest university assignments emerged from a personal irritation: the shrill sound of chalk scraping across a blackboard. By mixing chalk with book glue, she created a new compound from which she fabricated a sculptural neckpiece. She laughs when describing the result as rather unattractive, but an enclosed and functional object was never the point of this experiment. What mattered was the discovery that incompatible materials could generate entirely new behaviours. Matter was no longer fixed and became relational, unstable and capable of surprising her.

Kisch’s background in queer subculture informs this instability, though rarely as an overt declaration. The politics reside less in symbolism than in permission: permission for a body to remain undefined, hybrid and unresolved. An identity behaving less like a statement than a condition of matter. Rather than illustrating queerness through recognisable signs, Kisch constructs situations in which categories gradually begin to dissolve. Materials associated with fetish culture, medical technologies, cosmetics or industrial production are brought into contact until their origins become difficult to separate. The same logic extends to the body itself. Masculine and feminine, natural and artificial, ornament and base cease to function as stable oppositions. Queerness emerges less as a subject represented than as a method of resisting premature definition.

This ambiguity is also what gives the work its emotional force. The surfaces can appear seductive, vulnerable, protective and strangely alien all at once. Rather than resolving the body into a readable identity, they allow it to remain open, inviting viewers to linger in uncertainty rather than rushing towards recognition.

Her studio also reflects this way of thinking. Rather than bringing to mind a pristine designer’s atelier, it functions more like an industrial workshop where knowledge emerges through trial and error.

‘There are two paths,’ Kisch explains. ‘Either the material carries its heritage – sex toys, laboratories, assistive technologies – into the costume, so that history remains inside the new form. Or it’s precisely not knowing what you’re looking at that creates a heightened perception. When I don’t understand what I’m seeing, it can become something otherworldly.’

She rarely works alone, her practice resembles more so a workshop or laboratory than a solitary studio, a convergence of hands, skills and temperaments. Latex specialists, sewists, sculptors and technicians all enter the process.

‘I fall in love with people’s expressions,’ she says, and continues with how she motivates the artists to experiment within the collaboration: ‘You’re an expert at this: I want to see how you choose to refine your part.’

Collaboration becomes its own form of alchemy. Kisch acts less as a singular author than as the catalyst that brings different materials, disciplines and people into contact, allowing each encounter to redirect the work. Ideas are sketched, tested and abandoned.

‘If I wring myself like a sponge for a few days, I’ve distilled the main concept.’

The metaphor is revealing. Distillation separates essence from excess. What remains is not purity but concentration of a form that carries the traces of many hands, many decisions and many abandoned paths.

It is difficult to categorise Hanna Kisch’s work. She moves between jewellery, costume and experimental material research, but the core of her practice lies in the relationships that emerge between bodies and matter. Her objects refuse stable identities, just as the bodies inhabiting them resist fixed definitions.

Alchemy ultimately appears less as a metaphor than as a working method. Materials change state, bodies alter one another through contact, and meaning emerges precisely where certainty begins to dissolve.

Earlier that afternoon, Kisch described the strange intimacy of carrying another life inside her body. In her work, a similar logic unfolds. Matter meets matter, bodies meet bodies, and something new begins to take shape. What remains is rarely a stable form, but a temporary second skin that allows the body to become something slightly other than itself.

FOOTNOTES

1. Konstfack – University of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm.

2. Ädellabb – Bachelor’s programme in Jewellery and Corpus at Konstfack, renowned for its experimental approach to material and artistic practice.