Hannah Black, Bonaventure & Ebba Fransén Waldhör: ANXIETINA

The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is proud to present ANXIETINA, a specially commissioned project by Hannah Black, in collaboration with Bonaventure (Soraya Lutangu) and Ebba Fransén Waldhör.

Hannah Black’s installations, performances and videos collage together autobiographical, fictional and pop cultural fragments to explore theories and histories of race, gender and labor and how these ongoing violences structure individual experience as well as broader social tendencies. Her work combines the detritus of everyday social life, top 40 music, and video game visuals with Marxist, feminist and Black radical perspectives, evoking a sense of both alienation and intimacy that, her work suggests, is not only a manifestation of contemporary culture but is also the product of 500 or so years of capitalism and our many shared and individual struggles to live within it. Recent work has included collaborations with other artists including Juliana Huxtable and Precious Okoyomon. ANXIETINA, her collaborative proposal at the Centre will unfold through the second and third floors and feature a performance and two simultaneous exhibitions, — NXIETIN and A———-A.

ANXIETINA is the latest iteration of a performance collaboration between Hannah Black, Ebba Fransén Waldhör, and Soraya Lutangu (Bonaventure), loosely centered around the idea of a superhero figure called Anxietina. ANXIETINA is an attempt to build a mythic infrastructure around the pervasive anxiety of the everyday: her superpower is an anxiety that is both her own and an undifferentiated collective energy.

NXIETIN is a performance set in which a new version of Anxietina will take place during the opening on the 29 March; thereafter the set will remain on display as aftermath. The set is primarily composed of inflatable walls designed for training use by military and police. The walls are props dividing the space into interior and exterior areas. Anxietina occupies the outside of this ambivalent spatial arrangement. She is neither an enemy nor an ally. She channels two conflicting fantasies of others: the external threat and the longed-for object of desire. The performance’s previous iterations at MoMA PS1 in New York and the Chisenhale and the ICA in London imagined Anxietina moving through an everyday apocalypse, emphasizing the continuity of collective being as an internally fragmented series of sharp discontinuous breaks. In Geneva, fusing this apparent paradox even closer together, Anxietina marks the contours of a catastrophic domestic space.

On the third floor, A———-A presents a combination of works by the artists, including textile works by Fransén Waldhör previously used in Anxietina sets, posters by Black featuring fragments of previous performance texts as well as a disintegrating iteration of her recent solo show at Chisenhale Gallery, consisting of a portion of shredded copies of The Situation. The Situation is a collectively authored text produced from transcripts of conversations with friends and later censored to “protect people from their own banality”. One of Black’s earliest exhibited video works, Power Cut 1970 (2012) will be on display, as will her most recent three-screen video work, Beginning End None (2017).

Hannah Black is an artist and writer from the UK, living and working in New York. Her work has been recently exhibited at mumok (Vienna) and Chisenhale Gallery (London) and in a number of galleries including Real Fine Arts (New York), Arcadia Missa (London), Château Shatto (Los Angeles) and W139 (Amsterdam). Readings and performances have taken place at the New Museum, Interstate Projects and Cage (New York) the Whitechapel Gallery, the Showroom, and Cafe OTO (London). Her writing has been published in Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Harpers and frieze d/e, among other magazines. She is the author of two little books: Dark Pool Party (Dominica/Arcadia Missa, 2016) and Life (a collaboration with Juliana Huxtable (mumok, 2017)). 

Bonaventure (Soraya Lutangu) uses music as an identity research tool along with practical and speculative initiatives to connect her African and European roots and investigate human boundaries. 

Ebba Fransén Waldhör is a visual artist and designer based in Berlin. Trained in textile and surface design, her work explores different modes of perception and the material forms they take. 

Reservation required for the performance