Hannah Black: The Directions

A maze with limited outcomes: ruin, ruin, ruin, and in one case, a door. The question of how to live contorted into a question of where to go. In videos based on rambling, personal conversations under the star-map of the night sky, I talk about some of the places I have lived in. 

This exhibition, like all today, was made against a background of incomprehensible ruin and killing in Gaza and elsewhere. No substantive political perspective is offered, but there is the unanswerable wondering, half rhetorical half real: how can we live? 

This is not only a spiritual question, but also an economic one. The interior of the maze presents artworks from the Middelburg municipal collection, remnants of an artists’ basic income scheme that ran from 1949 to 1987.

The work also responds to Vleeshal as a collage of real and fantasized history, a building reconstructed from remnants and souvenirs after destruction during WW2, crisscrossed by the history of the Dutch East India Company whose legacy is implicit in all work shown in this place. 

Above and glimpsed through windows–outside the claustrophobia of individual decision/indecision–is a representation, drawn in shining materials, of the astrological birth chart of Al Aqsa Flood. To me, this is an attempt to convey the difficult preciousness of a lightning flash moment in which to read the time on the clock of the world, however painful its implications.

This text is written by Hannah Black. The exhibition is curated by Roos Gortzak, director of Vleeshal.