Richard Hancock

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...