Hannah Black
2021Intensive Care/Hot New Track
Hannah Black
Looping the karaoke track of Rihanna’s What’s My Name, Intensive Care/Hot New Track pairs celebrity gossip about Rihanna and Chris Brown with audio testimony from US military interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison, offering an oblique meditation on power relations, the trivialization of violence, and shifting registers of remorse.
Intensive Care/Hot New Track
My Bodies
Hannah Black
Closely cropped white men populate the video work My Bodies. Their faces slide like a corporate PowerPoint over grainy, noisy textures as a host of black women—Jennifer Hudson, Beyoncé, Aaliyah, and Ciara, among others—sing variations on “my body.” They are tightly sampled, as if to arrive at some kind of median. One clip that zooms into the pores of a sweaty pink forehead recalls a robotic text-to-voice line from another work, “And my skin shines with white people’s problems.” Unlike the white men, culled from a Google image search for CEOs, blackness is only ever heard and never seen. The artist explains, “If you came back, would you choose to have the same body or not? Would you have the body of a woman again? Or a woman of color?”
My Bodies
