Though this is Manchester born Hannah Black’s first institutional UK solo show, she is already well known for her incisive social awareness, with a conceptual art practice that interrogates issues surrounding race, gender, the body, social codes and capitalism. As a published writer, she often uses texts in her work – this show is comprised of books and other objects presenting edited conversations between the artist and her friends. Initiated by the deliberately vague idea of “the situation”, the discussions range from the abstract to the everyday, the personal to the political, and are filled with expressions of hope, anger and exhaustion.
Some Context is structured around 20,000 copies of The Situation, a book made up of transcribed, edited and censored conversations between the artist and friends about ‘the situation’. This theme is interpreted differently in each conversation. The books provide the stuffing – in shredded form – for the ‘transitional objects’ also displayed in the space, and will be shredded at the end of the exhibition.
In this new body of work Black continues to develop her enquiry into the production of, and the gaps between, practices and theories of subjectivity and collectivity. Some Context gestures towards the various potential uses of art’s uselessness – as comfort, as worship, as text and as archive.
Hannah Black, Some Context, Chisenhale Gallery, London, 22 September – 10 December
