Chisenhale Gallery presents a new commission and the first solo exhibition in a UK institution by Hannah Black.

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.

As part of the commissioning process, a programme of events has been devised in collaboration with Hannah Black. This includes a series of conversations in which participants have been invited to discuss a situation of their choice.

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Hannah Black (born 1981, Manchester) lives and works in New York. Most recently, Black’s installation, performance and moving image works have explored the co-dependency of credit, debt and guilt, the use of analogy in biology, and the tension between biomedical and political understandings of trauma. Her works fuse dissonant materials through formal similarities: a drawn-out note in a song becomes the cry of a falling person, or the corporality of bodybuilders is conflated and contrasted with the speculative nature of finance capital as embodied in vacant luxury apartment buildings.

Previous solo exhibitions include Small Room, mumok, Vienna; Soc or Barb, Bodega, New York (all 2017); and Not You, Arcadia Missa, London (2015). Selected group exhibitions include In The Flesh (Part Two), Gallery Diet, Miami; and W elt Am Draht, Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (both 2016); The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Yarat Contemporary Art Centre, Baku; and Does Not Equal, W139, Amsterdam, (both 2015). In 2017 her performance OR LIFE OR was presented at PS1 MoMA, New York. Her writing has been published in Tank, The New Inquiry, Texte zur Kunst, Artforum and frieze d/e. Her book Dark Pool Party(Dominica/Arcadia Missa) was published in 2016 and Life (Walther König/mumok), written in collaboration with Juliana Huxtable, was published in 2017.

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Opening: Thursday 14 September 2017, 6.30 – 8.30pm

http://chisenhale.org.uk

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Lead Supporter: Shane Akeroyd.

Hannah Black’s exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery is supported by Fabiana Marenghi Vaselli Bond; Julia Stoschek; The Elephant Trust; and Arts Council England Grants for the Arts. With additional support from the Hannah Black Supporters Circle.

Chisenhale Gallery’s Commissions Programme 2017-19 is supported by the LUMA Foundation.

Chisenhale Gallery’s Curatorial Trainee Programme 2016-18 is supported by Sirine and Ahmad Abu Ghazaleh.

Chisenhale Gallery’s Talks & Events Programme 2017 is supported by Helen Thorpe.