Hannah Black

Soc or Barb

January 14–February 19, 2017

Nationalist dreams and YouTube yoga meditations envision new dawns, with which come new beings, whether Soviet new men or epidermalized unfreedom. All unfolds, new days and lost nights and lost days and new nights, in the undifferentiated flux that is the history of us, the most inventive animal, the most adaptive and maladaptive. In recent reality, a perceived collapse or blur of political categories reveals the bare materials that were there all along: flesh, and its capacity to be made into bodies through thought, deed and subsequent history—flesh and the ideal of flesh. "Socialism or Barbarism" was the communist organizer and philosopher Rosa Luxemburg's wager about the future of capitalism—one or the other faces us. This is a particular conceptual opposition of society and barbarity, and perhaps that's why she didn't predict that both would come to be, or see that they were already here. This particular barbarian society of beings have clothed themselves in the signs of infinity. They know a dawn is not an interruption but a moment in a cycle; freshness is a sensory and not a moral question.

Hannah Black is an artist and writer from the UK. She lives in Berlin and sometimes New York. Previous exhibitions include Intensive Care at Legion TV, London (2013), Not You at Arcadia Missa, London (2015), and Screens Series at the New Museum, New York (2016). Upcoming shows include solo exhibitions at mumok, Vienna, and Chisenhale Gallery, London, and a performance commission for PS1's Sunday Sessions.