Hannah Black

Arcadia Missa is pleased to present Hannah Black’s third solo exhibition at the gallery, Hush Mr Giant, an anagram of “human rights”.

The exhibition includes a series of new conceptual paintings with text from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), contorted into surrealist-inspired nonsense poetry. Based on the rotating phrases from Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema (1926), and reflecting on the collapsing paradigm of universal human rights, fissured from the start by colonialism and slavery. The series explores universality as a historical symptom, a symptom of the psychosis of modernity. The paintings also reference the astrological event charts of universal humanism’s constitutive events, including the Haitian Revolution and the French Revolution.

Hannah Black (b. 1981, Manchester, UK) is an artist and writer based between Marseille, FR and New York, US. Black works across installation, painting, sculpture and video. Her artistic practice is driven by an inquiry into the boundaries and structures of human relationships, influenced by communist and black radical traditions.