vincent hannwacker

works

Big Joe

2026, 2 min.

Big Joe is a video work that combines a short story narrated by an AI-generated voice with unpopulated footage from Google Street View. The narrative revolves around the impending demolition of a church and the disappearance of a figure named Big Joe. Moving between loss and the everyday, it unfolds as a laconic and melancholic story. The narrator’s emotions remain strangely detached throughout.

The images depict the unremarkable streets and residential neighbourhoods of a small American town. They establish the setting for the story without illustrating its events. The synthetic voice and the algorithmically captured locations form a shared visual and acoustic layer in which personal memory and technological reproduction overlap.

reCaptured

2026, photo series

For several years, I have been collecting reCAPTCHA image tiles that I encounter in my everyday digital life. Originally part of an automated security system designed to distinguish human perception from machine image recognition, these images are removed from their original context in my work and reconsidered as photographs in their own right.

The collected image fragments depict glimpses of urban reality. They capture everyday scenes, incidental observations, and overlooked details from cities around the world. Their low-resolution, grainy aesthetic lends them a distinctive visual language, reminiscent of spontaneous photographic snapshots. Over the years, an unintended archive of urban life has emerged.

By removing the image tiles from their original digital context, I alter both their function and the way they are perceived. What once served merely as material for machine image recognition becomes an independent photographic work. reCaptured redirects our attention to images that appear millions of times every day and usually receive only a fleeting glance.

Sterne am Tag (Stars by day)

2026, 15 min., directed by Marlene Arnold, written & produced by Vincent Hannwacker

In this narrative short film, the former actress Charlotte has moved into the apartment of her late mother. She receives an unexpected visit from her brother and two filmmakers who want to use the apartment as a shooting location. But soon the young director discovers something very valuable hidden within the apartment.

La próxima generación (The next generation)

2025, 7 min.

In La próxima generación, Vincent Hannwacker examines the rise of the Argentinian neo-Nazi group Tacuara in the 1960s. In the wake of Adolf Eichmann’s capture in Buenos Aires, the group’s predominantly youthful members carried out a series of antisemitic attacks, kidnappings, and murders. Hannwacker reconfigures period newspaper articles into a fragmented slideshow that reflects the complexity and fractured historical memory of the time.

The work was created during the residency at URRA in Buenos Aires, supported by the Goethe Institut Buenos Aires, the Department of Arts and Culture of Munich, and the Instituto Cervantes Munich.

Driving down Broadway

2025, 18 min.

Driving down Broadway is a documentary video work that captures a journey along Broadway in New York, filmed purely through observation from bus windows and a rented bicycle. World-famous for its theater district, Broadway is the city’s longest and oldest street and the only one that cuts diagonally through Midtown’s grid. This unique alignment gives the Flatiron Building its iconic shape, while on the map, Broadway appears as the last remnant of the path once used by Native Americans, later adopted by the first Dutch settlers.

As the sidewalks pass by the viewers, Broadway becomes a symbol of the American Dream. Beginning in the socially underprivileged Bronx, it leads through Times Square, the temple of consumption, down to the Financial District at Manhattan’s southern tip, where decisions about the global economy are made. Driving down Broadway serves as a unique document and a portrait of New York and the United States.

K.

2025, 5 min.

K. is an AI-generated free adaptation of a few lesser-known writings and short stories by Franz Kafka. The work unites these fragments into a continuous stream, creating a dreamlike atmosphere in which the boundaries between reality and the subconscious blur. Through the immersive visual experience, viewers are drawn into a world that is at once strange and oddly familiar, reflecting Kafka’s recurring themes of alienation, surrealism, and the absurdities of life.

K. questions the role of artificial intelligence in art and its potential to explore the emotional depths of human experience. By combining Kafka’s texts with contemporary AI methods, the work challenges traditional forms of storytelling and invites the audience to experience Kafka’s oeuvre anew, which feels more relevant than ever.

MoneyNations

2024, 23 min., in collaboration with Ilinca Fechete and Martin Huber

„MoneyNations“ was an exhibition, a webzine, a radio program, a conference, a video archive, a printed publication, an infrastructure, a counter-public, an ongoing discussion, and a transnational network of friends, initiated by Marion von Osten. The project emerged from the urgency to respond to the hegemonial forces of the “West” within the radically changed conditions of post–Cold War Europe. „MoneyNations“ addressed and intervened in the interdependence between “transnational capital flows,” media representation, exploitative economic relations, and processes of identity formation and reconfiguration.

In an attempt to delineate the profound political relevance of these efforts as well as their coincidental connection to our own findings, our work organizes and intertwines private archival material from LaborK3000 with publicly accessible material from the Swiss Social Archive, including images, correspondence, and other ephemera, into a video work. Parts of the „MoneyNations“ research trips between 1998 and 2000 are presented alongside excerpts from interviews, aiming to “build a counter-representational pool of theorists to discuss questions of representational politics in the perception of the so-called East and their significance for border construction, new nationalism, and low-wage production sites.”

The suspect Vincent Hannwacker

2024, slide projection

At some point, while Googling myself—as one does—I came across a 1986 New York Times article about a small time criminal: a clerk who sold office supplies and furniture from his workplace during business hours, and was eventually caught. The article reads like the plot of a gangster film, complete with “undercover detectives posing as businessmen.” And the protagonist of the story shares the same name as me: Vincent Hannwacker.

Reading the article, and feeling the strange surrealism of seeing my name at the center of a 1980s New York crime story, I asked myself: who was this man? The only namesake I could find on the internet. In my work, I aim to revive this overlooked footnote from nearly forty years ago, embarking on a search for my criminal double. Using my father’s slides—who was also in New York in the mid-1980s—excerpts from the original New York Times article, and new slide photographs of the real locations mentioned, I tell the story of Vincent Hannwacker: “the man who was supposed to mind the store but ended up selling it.”

Der Selbstmord der Susanne Kuhn (The suicide of Susanne Kuhn)

2022, 18 min.

The video work observes the protagonist Susanne Kuhn during the final preparations before her suicide. In static shots, she tidies up, writes her farewell letter, and takes a shower before sitting on the bed, taking pills, and waiting for death. A examination of suicide that is neither romanticized nor psychologized.

Musarion

2020, 27 min., co-direction: Dominik Bais, Marie Jaksch, Mara Pollak, Julian Rabus

Musarion adapts the eponymous story by the writer Christoph Martin Wieland and transposes the love story into the present day. Phanias has withdrawn from Athens to the countryside to leave his old life behind. But one day he encounters his former lover, Musarion, who seeks to bring him back to reason. The art film explores the struggle for an enlightened form of love, one capable of overcoming philosophical and political fanaticism. Musarion is a collaborative film by five artists, combining elements of the original text with opera, theatre, video art, and narrative cinema.

Lucy & Llibert

2018, 9 min.

Lucy is from Germany. Llibert is from Spain. Both are twenty-two. A documentary portrait of the two, their language barriers, and the feeling of being young and in love. The short film was shot on 16mm and combines the footage with analog black-and-white photographs. At the same time, the film also functions as a love letter to the Nouvelle Vague.

about

Vincent Hannwacker was born in 1997 in Munich, DE
2024 graduation Academy of Fine Arts Munich in the class of Julian Rosefeldt as his Meisterschüler
2024 graduation University of Television and Film Munich

awards/residencies/scholarships

selected exhibtions and screenings



vincent.hannwacker@gmail.com