Epsiode 7: Nomadic artist Hanna Burkart Walking, sleeping and creating art in dialogue with place

Episode 7: Nomadic artist Hanna Burkart walking, sleeping and creating art in dialogue with place

Season 3 Sicily

Hanna Burkart. Image credit Gianluca Normanno 2025

Vienna-born artist Hanna Burkart has spent more than a decade living without a permanent home, creating artworks through walking, sleeping, and living in diverse places around the world. In this episode, she shares how travel is both her studio and her subject, and how site-specific works emerge from deep immersion in landscapes and communities.

In this episode:

• Why Hanna chose a nomadic life and how it fuels her art practice

• The role of walking, sleeping under the stars and inhabiting abandoned spaces in creating site-specific works

• Transforming everyday materials, like cardboard, into art that reflects place and community, and

• How encounters with landscapes—from Mount Etna to coastal caves—shape her themes of habitation, resilience and connection.

BIOGRAPHY

Hanna Burkart (b. 1989, Vienna, Austria) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice operates at the intersection of site-specific art, performative research, and applied artistic exploration. Burkart lived and worked more than seven years, without a permanent home or studio, investigating and documenting alternative modes of dwelling and movement. Her artistic research focuses on contemporary nomadic ways of living, daily rituals like walking and sleeping, as well as the cultural techniques of habitation. By immersing herself in the places she seeks to engage with, Burkart explores strategies of adaptation to different spatial and social contexts. The conscious appropriation and redefinition of spaces form the foundation of her broader artistic practice, which includes objects, installations, and architectural interventions. She documents and expands her experiences through photography, text and drawings. Her ongoing performance series Sleeping International shows more than 600 different sleeping places she has inhabited.

Burkart works in extraordinary contexts around the globe, including Senegal, Japan, Brazil, New York, and diverse urban and rural regions across Europe. Her work has been presented in numerous solo exhibitions, among them in Warsaw (PL), Abéné (SEN), Freiburg (DE), Tokyo (JPN), Bregenz (AT), Vienna (AT), Como (IT) and Linguaglossa (IT). She is the recipient of multiple awards and fellowships, including the BMKOES Outstanding Artist Award, the City of Vienna Annual Grant, and the Hans Hollein Grant, among others. Hanna Burkart holds a Master’s degree in Fine Art as well as a Master’s degree in Industrial Design from the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Text: Studio Hanna Burkart