Video still of Hannah Black, Broken Windows, 2022. Image courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa.

The Art Gallery of York University is pleased to release The Phantom: Transcripts of Videos by Hannah Black

13 x 18.5 cm, 128 pages smyth-sewn softcover, 2024
ISBN 978-0-921972-85-3
$24

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.

Hannah Black is an internationally established artist, working across mediums from video to performance and is well known for her critical writing and poetry. Her solo exhibition, The Meaning of Life, was held at the Art Gallery of York University in 2022. Black’s most recently exhibitions include Hard Limits, Gallerina, New York, 2024; 2020, Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris, 2023; Wheel of Fortune, gta exhibitions, Zurich, 2021; Beginning, End, None, Busan Biennial 2020; Dede, Eberhard, Phantom, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany, 2019. She has published widely, including in Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Tank, Harpers, 4 Columns, and The New Inquiry, and is the author of Life, 2017, co-written with performance artist Juliana Huxtable, and Dark Pool Party, 2015, an auto-fictional collection of poems and texts. Black is represented by Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin, and Arcadia Missa, London.

For more information, please contact Michael Maranda, assistant curator, publications, at mmarand@yorku.ca.

This publication comes at an exciting moment for the gallery, as we transition from the Art Gallery of York University to The Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery, opening soon with a new building, a visible vault, and a renewed engagement with the numerous communities in which we are embedded.

Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) is a socially minded not-for-profit contemporary art gallery that is a space for the creation and appreciation of art and culture. It is a supported Unit of York University within the President’s Division. We are externally funded as a public art gallery through the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, local and international foundations, embassies, and our membership who support our programs.

The Art Gallery of York University acknowledges our presence on the ancestral territory of the Anishinabek Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the Huron-Wendat. We offer this land acknowledgement as an expression of gratitude and appreciation to those on whose territory we reside. It is a small way of honouring the Indigenous people who have for generations cared for this land and its waterways. It is also an opportunity to reflect on the history of what has brought us to reside here and understand our place within this history.

We are cognizant that we cannot separate the histories of York University from the history of settler colonialism and slavery in Canada, and in this regard, we also recognize thousands of African descendants have been enslaved, displaced, and judicialized on this same territory. Today, in Toronto, non-Indigenous people exist as settlers and as displaced peoples on traditional Indigenous lands which are currently held under treaty by the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.

Knowing that colonial legacies continue through various modes of systemic oppression that affect the everyday lives of far too many people, we encourage our communities to take the time to learn about the history and to support the struggles and demands of Indigenous peoples as well as other communities who experience oppression and share the territories we occupy.

Through AGYU’s programming, we strive to build reciprocal relationships with Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities on and off campus and continually work to improve our anti-racist and anti-hate, equity, and ecological practices. We welcome your suggestions on how we may continue to grow in this regard.

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