Crossing the Park

2021 - ongoing

"The goal in crossing the park is to fully become a Liverpool fan, not merely to pretend or perform. Hanna’s intent is to properly change position and perspective: to believe and belong... In certain respects, this contrarian venture compares with other artistic efforts to transform the self. We might think of artists who craft co-existing alter-egos and parallel identities, or those who permanently re-invent and rename themselves as new personalities — locking away the facts of their autobiographical origins — or those who efface and question ‘authentic’ identity through perpetual, ever-evolving performance, or, again, those who engage the body as a malleable medium, altering its form and appearance through medical and surgical intervention. Hanna’s approach resembles some of the above and none of the above. In his art and life, he is still himself, but newly aligned; the same, but different. His undertaking has the high-minded ambition of a transformative artistic act, but also the embedded mundanity of a step-by-step change in everyday behaviour. As such, resemblances to earlier experiments in artistic self-questioning (and self-construction) are perhaps strongest where we can see a shared tendency to express high-minded conceptual intentions in unspectacular styles, through low-key representations and actions."

Declan Long, Same Difference: Five Conflicting Thoughts on Crossing the Park, April 2024 (excerpt)

“The contradiction between the romance of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ and the feeling that football is hard to love is where my fandom resides. I see it as a methodology, a way of looking at the world through the prism of football. A lifetime as a football fan has confronted me with questions about nationalism and immigration, gender, money, power and what it means to belong. It’s possible to be a football fan without engaging with all these large issues and how they intersect with the sport – it may be easier, too. But I am not that kind of fan. The more I think about fandom, the more I believe that it is not only this predetermined thing – an aspect of birth or family – rather, I see it as a way to recognise difference and think through it. I say that through football I’ve learned to think of love as a form of insistence. For that love to be challenged, the way Hanna’s project challenges the way many football fans think about their connection to their team, means we fans have to come up with a language for that unreasonable thing: a love of a football team. That language will, perhaps, include an awareness of all the things that make football so hard to love. And a warmth towards all the things that make that love possible, that make a whole world.”

Gat, Orit. (catalogue essay) Running Past Solitude, 2022