The Handled & The Laboured Photograph

Richard Hancock is a visual and performance artist based in Berlin. His multi-disciplinary practice engages with issues of power, value, and desire; commonly in relation to questions around social class, queerness, lineage and heritage. Wider historical narratives, artistic legacies, and anecdotal familial stories, are frequently deployed and mined as references. Instabilities in hierarchical structures and categories of identification are mirrored through playful and revealing relationships between form and media; exposing cracks within and between languages of photography, drawing, performance, and text. Since 2001, he has collaborated with Traci Kelly on the project hancock & kelly exploring questions of collaboration, identity, and inter-subjectivity. The resulting works have been a series of visceral and queer encounters, both moving and spectacular. An Empire, his current research project with Litsa Kiousi, is an exploration of the histories, atrocities, presents and futures of empire building. Through a collaborative dialogue, the artists map the tide of European history, and grapple with the complexity of existence in a modern empire. It is an urgent enquiry into the future of a world balancing on a dangerous brink of repetition. In addition to his own works, Hancock has performed and danced in works by Sonia Boyce, Nao Bustamante, Guillermo Gómez Peña/La Pocha Nostra, and Patrizio Di Massimo. He choreographed and starred in the first part of Liz Rosenfeld's Surface Tension Trilogy; and photographed Isaiah Lopaz's series, Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Him. Richard Hancock holds a first-class honours degree in Fine Art from Nottingham Trent University School of Art & Design (2002), and a Master's degree with distinction in The Body & Representation from the University of Reading (2005). He has performed, exhibited, and taught internationally at events and venues such as Arnolfini, Bristol (UK), Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt (DE), Museu de Évora (PT), Tramway, Glasgow (UK), Performance Space, Sydney (AU), the Chicago Cultural Center (US), and Nottingham Contemporary (UK). He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards from Arts Council England, the Arts & Humanities Research Council, the Berlin Senatsverwaltung für Kultur & Europa, Fonds Darstellende Künste, Stiftung Kunstfonds, and the Deutscher Künstlerbund.