Hannah Black

Lisa Cooley is pleased to 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.

Credits addresses notions of debt across layered historical contexts. The film imagines a speculative wilderness landscape set against the backdrop of contemporary creditor and debtor relationships. In particular, the film 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 which 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.