Art Metropole

#16064

The Phantom: Hannah Black: Transcripts of Videos by Hannah Black

Artist

Hannah Black

Price

$24.00

Date

2024

Publisher

AGYU

Format

Artists' Books

ISBN

978-0-921972-85-3

Size

13 × 18.5 cm

Length

128 pp

Genre

Interview, Film/Video, Canadian, Contemporary Art

Hannah Black has established “the interview” as central to her art practice. Initially developed as an anti-representational strategy, it has become a way for her to break down the idea of linear progression (whether in history or in politics), playing with the chronology of a conversation and yet still achieving a coherent narrative. She compares her process of editing to the process of writing, breaking down and building up the recordings as needed. By primarily presenting the voice of the subject of her intensive interviews, she complicates the authoritarian nature of writing, and art-making, by positioning the artist not in relation to something but rather to someone. Like cinema verité, her role is acknowledged and present but only in stepping back from the main focus, allowing the viewer to engage with the interview subjects as primarily subjects, but subjects always mediated by Black’s editorial process.

This reader is published as an extension of Black’s exhibition The Meaning of Life, commissioned for the AGYU in 2022. The solo exhibition featured a 2-channel video installation including Broken Windows and POLITICS! along with a series of objects related to brands, shopping, and looting. Also on view was a selection of Black’s earlier video work, which uses the interview as a basic format and formal process. All the video works featured in the exhibition are transcribed in this reader, along with a few additional key works. The book is introduced by an interview with Black and Jenifer Papararo, director/curator of AGYU. Teasing out Black’s motivations and strategies, Papararo frames these transcripts as research material, a resource for readers to use to approach the disfluencies of Black’s videos and as a way of critically engaging in the overarching role of capital in contemporary society.

Elegantly designed by Mark Bennett, this limited-run publication will prove key in contextualising the videos of Hannah Black and her use of video as subject and process. Available now on the AGYU website, and soon through other venues.