Hannah Black “Credits (2016)”

Lisa Cooley Fine Art

This event has ended.

Lisa Cooley present the U.S. debut of Hannah Black’s video Credits (2016). The video will premiere at the gallery on Friday, June 10, 2016, at 7pm, preceded by a brief introduction by the artist. It will remain on view in the gallery’s office viewing space until August 26.

Credits addresses notions of debt across layered historical contexts. The video imagines a speculative wilderness landscape set against the backdrop of contemporary creditor and debtor relationships. In particular, the video takes up the medieval practice of shaming through public humiliation to explore race and class as interconnected modes of oppression enforced through public social life. Black presents these experiences as forced externalities akin to historical modes of ostracism and questions the ways in which debt exists as a redundant form of punishment which merely re-enacts already existing forms of living punishment.

The coercive fusing of social meanings and values onto the body is brought into further historical relief through the emergence of a potential escape narrative. Black depicts this narrative via hazy digital hallucinations of Doggerland, a now-sunken strip of land that connected Great Britain to mainland Europe 10,000 years ago. In Credits, Doggerland evokes both the inevitability of historical change as well as a moment in time free from concepts of credit and debt—a place where creditors cannot access their debtors and the very structures of social stratification are unhinged.
Hannah Black is an artist and writer from the United Kingdom. She lives in Berlin, Germany. She completed her MFA at Goldsmiths, London, United Kingdom, in 2013 and was a studio participant at the Whitney ISP, New York, from 2013 to 2014. Her work in video and installation has been exhibited at Arcadia Missa and Legion TV, London; Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles, California; W139, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and the Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, Germany. Readings/performances have taken place at the New Museum, Interstate Projects, and Cage, New York; and at the Whitechapel, the Showroom, and Cafe Oto, London. Her writing has been published in The New Inquiry, Texte zur Kunst, Harpers, and Artforum, among others.

Credits was commissioned by Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, United Kingdom, where it will remain on view until July 2.