Set Up Situations: Photography As Action @ MarinMOCA
HCMN is a live performance by Kristie Hansen featuring three invited Bay Area hair stylists who will collaboratively create a single, unique haircut—cutting simultaneously on one participant. The performance will take place at MarinMOCA, where audiences are invited to bear witness to the negotiations, conversations, and moments of drama that unfold throughout the process.
The relationship between cutter and subject is amplified through the live micing of accessories and tools, which are mixed in real time to produce an evolving soundtrack that fills the gallery space.
In 2010, Kristie Hansen collaborated with Japanese artist Koki Tanaka in San Francisco to create Haircut by 9 Hairdressers at Once (Second Attempt) —a haircut performance that helped shape Tanaka’s artistic practice around constructed “set-up situations.” This earlier work also serves as a key inspiration for the exhibition at MarinMOCA.
Participants: Kristie Hansen, Erik Webb, Nelson Loskamp, and Teresa Delgado.
About the Exhibition
Set Up Situations brings together artists who use photography not merely as a medium of documentation, but as an active tool—one that intervenes, performs, and provokes. These artists approach photography as action: a gesture, a confrontation, and a collaboration. The exhibition invites viewers to consider the emotional and psychological textures embedded within images—what lies beneath the surface, in the act of looking and being seen.
Photography here becomes a form of personal activism—a space where identity, resistance, and self-representation converge. The works reclaim narratives, question visibility, and open dialogue with the unseen or untold. In this way, Set Up Situations embraces photography as an evolving, performative act, where meaning unfolds in the moment of encounter.
The exhibition’s title draws inspiration from a strategy coined by Japanese visual artist Koki Tanaka, who constructs open-ended situations without predetermined outcomes—emphasizing process, unpredictability, and collective experience.
Featuring regional, national, and international artists:
Iván Argote, Juan Brenner, Tania Candiani, Liz Cohen, Leslie García, Alan de Souza, Ana Teresa Fernández, Jim Jocoy, Michael Lundgren, Mariel Miranda, Omar Sosa, Gina Osterloh, Stephanie Syjuco, Koki Tanaka, and Richard T. Walker.