Hannah Binte Mohammad Alf @ Hannah Dale


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Hannah Dale is a Singapore-based artist working across photography, installation, and sculpture. Her practice examines the body as a porous, relational site shaped through biology, care, and lived experience. Working with recycled and cultivated biomaterials, she approaches art-making as a durational process — one that unfolds through growth, maintenance, and inevitable decay where time and care are embedded into the material itself.

Dale’s interest in the body emerged from recurring health issues and long-term exposure to medical spaces, alongside becoming a caregiver for her mother following hospitalisation. These experiences fostered a turn toward biology as a mode of self-rehabilitation rooted in care, observation, and endurance. Having grown up between Norway and Singapore, her practice is deeply informed by nature and place, where health and environment are understood as inseparable systems. Her works often carry bodily imprints rather than representations: skins grown, surfaces moulded, and forms shaped through prolonged contact, repetition, and attentiveness. These processes mirror the rhythms of illness in the making, where the material degenerates, morphs or changes through tempering through ongoing negotiation with their limits.
My practice investigates the women's body as a relational system shaped through body, flesh, and blood. Rather than treating the body as a fixed or representational form, I work with cultivated and recycled materials to explore how identity is formed and observed through processes of growth, generational relation, and degeneration, through a woman's lens.

Art-making in my practice is durational and contingent. Care and time are integral to the work, embedding labour, vulnerability, and temporal change into the material itself. These processes resist permanence and control, positioning care not as an aesthetic gesture but as an ongoing negotiation with material limits. The work exists in a state of becoming, where form is continuously altered by environmental conditions, handling, and decay.

The works requires attentiveness rather than consumption, drawing attention to the material practice and a means of rethinking the body beyond autonomy or mastery: asthetics of vulnerability, responsibility, and embodied presence.



Title: Where the Body Experiments on Itself
Year: 2026
Medium: Cellulose, Acetic Acid Bacteria, Glass, Metal Shelvings
Statement:

My research centres on the body as a site of ongoing repair, focusing on how organic and living materials can operate as bodily extensions or prosthetic substitutes in conditions of chronic pain and self-rehabilitation. Across writing and studio-based inquiry, these materials are used to examine the persistent compulsion to repair rather than to enact repair itself. Informed by artistic practice and biomedical research into tissue prosthetics, cultivated materials such as SCOBY function as speculative bodily substitutes that register growth, degradation, and care without offering resolution. These material processes foreground maintenance, failure, and persistence as central conditions of bodily experience. By resisting narratives of cure and mastery, the research positions the body as something continually negotiated through matter, time, and vulnerability.