Hannah Black

Hannah Black
Born	Manchester, London, England
Nationality	British
Education	Whitney Independent Study Program, New York, 2014 Goldsmiths, University of London, (MFA) 2013
Alma mater	University of London
Known for	Film, video, art and writing
Notable work	The Dark Pool Party
Style	Mixed media artist
Website	Vimeo accountTwitter account

Hannah Black is a conceptual visual artist and writer active in black identity politics who wrote the book Dark Pool Party. She works mostly in text and video. Hatty Nestor writes that "Hannah Black’s practice deals primarily with issues of global capitalism, feminist theory, the body and sociopolitical spaces of control."

Biography

Black was born in Manchester, England. Her mother's side of the family descends from Russian Jewish refugees and immigrants and her father is the son of an immigrant from Jamaica with Caribbean-Irish ancestry. She currently lives in Berlin, Germany, but mostly works in London and New York.

Career

In 2013, Black received a Masters of Fine Arts in Art Writing from the public research institution Goldsmiths College, University of London. From 2013 - 2014, she lived in New York City where she was a studio participant in the Whitney International Study Programme.

In March 2017, Black protested the painting Open Casket by American artist Dana Schutz in the Whitney Biennial. The painting features the iconic image of Emmett Till's mutilated body from his funeral in 1955. Till, a 14 year old African American boy, was tortured and lynched by two white men after being falsely accused of flirting with a white woman. The photograph the painting is based on galvanized the Civil Rights Movement. Black wrote a letter to the curators and staff at the Whitney Biennial to remove and destroy the painting with support from over 30 non-white artists and support from white artists. Part of the controversy is that Schutz, a white artist, possibly will profiting off a painting of black suffering. Schutz has started that she intends to never sell the painting

Black wrote in the open letter:

it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun, though the practice has been normalized for a long time. Although Schutz’s intention may be to present white shame, this shame is not correctly represented as a painting of a dead Black boy by a white artist—those non-Black artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should first of all stop treating Black pain as raw material. The subject matter is not Schutz’s; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights. The painting must go.

After a statement from the curators defending the painting, it remains in the show.

Black wrote The Dark Pool Party, series of seven texts the mix fiction, nonfiction, cultural criticism, critique, and poetry. According to the magazine Art in America, "Hannah Black’s practice deals primarily with issues of global capitalism, feminist theory, the body and sociopolitical spaces of control."

Black is also a contributing editor to the New York-based magazine, The New Inquiry.

Group exhibitions

2016

• Being There, Vilma Gold, London, UK
• The world no longer exists, *kurator, Rapperswil, CH
• No! I Am No Singular Instrument, Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, US
• The fraud that goes under the name of love, Audain, Vancouver BC, CA
• WHATEVER MOVES BETWEEN US ALSO MOVES THE WORLD IN GENERAL, Murray Guy, New York, US
• WELT AM DRAHT, Julia Stoschek Collection Berlin, Berlin, DE
• Open Source, Gillett Square, London, UK
• On Limits: Estrangement in the Everyday, The Kitchen, New York, US
• Reena’s Bedstuy Glove Affair, offsite, New York, US
• Ways of Living, David Roberts Art Foundation, London, UK
• Active Ingredient, Lisa Cooley, New York, US
• In the Flesh Part 2, Gallery Diet, Miami, US
• 500 boxes of contraband, David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, UK

2015

• The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Yarat Contemporary Art Centre, Baku, AZ
• Workland: The Fence Is A Narrow Place, Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles, US
• Does Not Equal, W139, Amsterdam, NL
• Girls of the Internet Museum, Sala Luis Miro Quesada Garland, Lima, PE

Select talks, events and projects

2017

• Screen: Hannah Black, MOCA, Los Angeles, US
• OR LIFE OR, a new performance by Hannah Black as part of an ongoing collaboration with the musician Bonaventure and the designer Ebba Fransén Waldhör, MoMA PS1, New York

2016

• Anxietina: A performance by Hannah Black and Bonaventure, ICA, London, UK
• ‘Capacity’, This is Public Space, Up Projects, London, UK
• Finding the Body: The Last Transgression? Central Saint Martins, London, UK
• What Time Is It on the Clock of the World?, Stadtkuratorin Hamburg, Hamburg, DE
• Recognizing, Imagining, Relation., Hester, New York, US
• Blackness in Circulation, Open Score, New Museum, New York, US
• Edition,Toronto, CA

2015

• YES SCREAMING NO, The One Minutes, Intersections, ArtRotterdam, NL
• Projections Program C, New York Film Festival, New York, US
• Perspectives, Framer Framed, Amsterdam, NL
• ‘Fall of Communism’, Image Festival winner, Overkill Award,, Toronto, CA
• Screening #1 London, Schwarzwallee, Basel, CH
• Canon Today, TZK Gala Conference, Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Berlin, DE
• In conversation with Andrea Crespo, Swiss Institute, New York, US
• 7 on 7, New Museum, New York, US
• Biocode, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, US

2014 Total Body Conditioning, Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, PO City Built At Night, Rematerialising Feminism, Arcadia Missa, London, UK Columbine Library, Societe, with Bunny Rogers, Berlin, DE

Publications

2016

• Black, H. (2016). THE IDENTITY ARTIST AND THE IDENTITY CRITIC. Artforum International, 54(10), 338-339.
• Black, H. (2016). 9th Berlin Biennale. Artforum International, 55(1), 350-352.
• Black, H. (2016). This is Crap. Frieze.com. Retrieved at [1]
• Black, H. (2016). Dark Pool Party. London: Dominica/Arcadia Missa.
• Black, H. (2016). Fractal Freedoms. Afterall. Spring/Summer 2016.

2015

• Black, H. (2015). Social Life. Texte zur Kunst. 98, 150-176. Retrieved at [2]

2014

• Black, H. (2014). Crazy in Love. The New Inquiry. Retrieved at [3]
• Black, H. (2014). The Loves of Others. The New Inquiry. Retrieved at [4]

Themes

The Body

The bulk of Black’s work addresses the idea of what it means to have a body and how individuals experience having a body differently. In the first half of My Bodies she juxtaposes images of white, male business executives to the voices of African-American, females singers. The second half of the video shows poetic text that describes in the second person, an out of body experience that occurs after death in which the person, you, is deciding whether or not they want to be born again into a new body. One line reads, “you must keep hold of what it means to have hands eyes teeth." It seems to call out this almost universal understanding that people have in regards to having a body. However, connecting this with the first half the video, the message deals more with the idea that more goes into the experience of having a body than the physical attributes that most everyone shares. In an interview with Jessica Darling about the piece, Hannah Black said, “ I wanted to say something about how there is no generic body, no such thing as ‘the body’; bodies are raced, gendered, and assisted differently in the world.” Black also addresses the idea of having a body in her video The Neck. The video begins with Black saying, "These are just some of the things I got wrong in the drawings I did as a child.” She points out how she used to draw people with their necks connected directly to their shoulders, with their stick-like fingers protruding out of circular palms and all their weight balanced on their the heels of their feet. While the video also has political ties, it seems to talk about how an individual begins to understand how the body is pieced together, as Black says “One day in the kitchen watching my mother get dishes out of the cupboard, I understood that she had a neck. I looked down at my drawing, it was completely wrong.”

Racial Identity

Hannah Black is Russian, Jewish, Caribbean and Irish. In an interview with Mash Magazine, she said “I never know quite how to describe myself. Mixed-race is a bad word, biracial is a stupid word, half-something and half-another is also stupid. Operatively, my self-definition is black and that’s the one that feels most consistent with my experience.” In an interview with Jessica Darling, Black said, “My work isn't really "about" race, but it comes from my experience and thoughts and my experience and thoughts are marked by race, or specifically blackness and Jewishness, in weird ways.” While Black does not make work that is specifically about racial identity because it is apart of her personal experience, it is a theme in her work. When Black address how race effects one’s perception of their body, she’s addressing racial categorization, which is the creation of and the placement into categories, even when the individual doesn’t fit into that category.Black’s video Intensive Care/Hot New Track, while it is about violence, it opens with what appears to be an image of a slave ship spinning in a white hand and it makes a statement about race. This is also seen in My Bodies, including exclusively female, African-America vocals makes a statement about how the way African-America women experience having a body differs from other people.

Intersectional Feminism

The feminist themes in Black’s work go beyond obtaining equal rights for women and look for ways to end oppression. In an interview with Jessica Darling about My Bodies, Black said, “This is part of the black critique of white feminism: the latter assumes, absurdly, that all women have bodies in the same way.” Black’s work pushes for recognition that race and gender, as well as countless other factors, influence how an individual experiences their body and that it is oppressive to believe that everyone has a body in the same way.

External links

• Artists's Vimeo
• Articles at The New Inquiry