Room 112 starts with the celebrity interview convention of shot / reverse shot and then expands and disintegrates it as the piece progresses. The hotel room setting serves as the location of any number of events. It is no accident that this is where movie studios choose to make their stars available for interviews, as it is only in such a 'non-place' that local Montreal television personality Mosé Persico (the host of Entertainment Spotlight on CFCF, mentioned on several websites as a press-junket-loving sycophant) can sit across from Tom Cruise and have what may resemble a conversation. Whether or not they are in the same room, or simply edited together from an EPK (Electronic Press Kit) distributed by the studio is irrelevant. Each is playing an assigned role in the performance well known as Celebrity Interview.

Adad Hannah’s Stills are a combination of performance art, video art and photography. The image moves, but, from beginning to end, shows the performers carrying out one single frozen action. Hannah calls them long exposure videos, with the takes lasting between five and fifteen minutes, and being shown in real time without sound or editing. They are reminiscent of tableaux vivants, a popular nineteenth-century form of art in which groups of actors represented (mostly) paintings before an audience. These tableaux owed their effect particularly to the possibility of reinforcing the conveyance of the image by combining greater physical presence with time for contemplation within a theatrical setting.

Adad Hannah was born in New York in 1971, and currently lives in Montreal where he is a PhD candidate at Concordia University. His video Stills have recently been presented at WRO 05 11th International Media Arts Biennale (Poland 2005), G39 (Cardiff 2005), Viper Basel (2004), Loop 04 International Video Art Fair (Barcelona), SeNef Festival/Ilmin Art Museum (Seoul 2004), Big M, Mediakunst Tour (Groningen, Amsterdam, and Nijmegen 2004), and Artists Space (New York 2003). Nationally he has shown at Ace Art, Alternator, B-312, Dazibao, MSVU, Optica, SAW, Séquence, and TPW. In 2004 he won the Images Festival Installation/New Media Award (Toronto), and the Bogdanka Poznanovic Award at Videomedeja 8.
http://adadhannah.com

Adad Hannah’s Stills are a combination of performance art, video art and photography. The image moves, but, from beginning to end, shows the performers carrying out one single frozen action. Hannah calls them long exposure videos, with the takes lasting between five and fifteen minutes, and being shown in real time without sound or editing. They are reminiscent of tableaux vivants, a popular nineteenth-century form of art in which groups of actors represented (mostly) paintings before an audience. These tableaux owed their effect particularly to the possibility of reinforcing the conveyance of the image by combining greater physical presence with time for contemplation within a theatrical setting.