PRESENTATION: Hannah Black-HUSH MR GIANT
Hannah Black’s artistic practice is driven by an inquiry into the boundaries and structures of human relationships, influenced by communist, psychoanalytic and black radical traditions. Her work functions conceptually through a co-dependence between thinking and feeling, using conversations and collaborations featuring texts, voices, prints, videos, sculptural interventions, and performances.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Arcadia Missa Gallery
“HUSH MR GIANT”—an anagram of human rights—is the title of Hannah Black’s solo exhibition, comprising six circular oil-on-canvas paintings that echo the rotating word-disks in Marcel Duchamp’s surrealist film “Anemic Cinema”. Each canvas spirals outward with warped text drawn from six different articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Through homophony, the solemn cadences of international law collapse into nonsensical verse: “Everyone has the right…” dissolves into “even yearners to riot…”, and so on. This “sounds-like” methodology refuses stable meaning, instead generating unpredictable associations within language. Such homophonic play, as Lacan describes, is a deposit of collective unconscious experience, a petrified layer where words lose their referential certainty—“the death of the sign it carries.” This breakdown of meaning gestures toward a historical truth: the liberal-humanist vision of universality, while never truly enacted, once held immense ideological weight. That vision has now been spectacularly dismantled, replaced by a frank regime of domination where “might is right” serves as global doctrine. The Declaration itself, drafted in 1948 in the shadow of World War II and the Nazi genocide, coincided with the colonization of Palestine and preceded the wave of decolonial struggles that shook the mid-twentieth century. Authored under the authority of the victorious Allied powers, it was never legally binding, and it smuggled in Western hegemony under the guise of universality. Seventy-seven years later, its promises reverberate grotesquely: “humanitarian values” arrive as airstrikes, sanctions, blockades, and torture. What once posed as universal ethics now serves as a mutilated cover for domination. This betrayal traces back to the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whose radical egalitarian impulses were swiftly calcified into new rationalizations for conquest and exploitation. Against this ongoing ruin, Black’s paintings reach toward surrealism as a fragile line of hope. In the words of Suzanne Césaire, surrealism becomes “the tightrope of our hopes,” stretched precariously across the abyss of fascism. For Césaire, surrealism’s inner freedom marked an opening beyond the suffocating rationalities of colonial rule; for Black, it remains a way to conjure resistance, even if that resistance feels at times powerless against the machinery of state and empire. Formally, each painting is punctured with nails and threaded to map the astrological event chart of a historical revolution corresponding to the article it distorts. Article 4, which declares that “no one shall be held in slavery or servitude,” aligns with the Haitian Revolution, while Article 13, affirming the right “to return to one’s country,” is marked by the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936. These constellations remind us that “rights” are not benevolent gifts bestowed from above, nor eternal truths, but contingent outcomes of struggle, rebellion, and collective psychosis. In this sense, “HUSH MR GIANT “exposes both the absurdity and the violence embedded in the discourse of rights. The paintings reveal how language fractures under the weight of history, and how universality, always compromised, survives only as a dream continually re-inscribed by those who fight at its margins.
Photo: Hannah Black, Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference (American Revolution), 2025, Oil, cotton and nails on canvas ∅ 100 x 3 cm (∅ 39 3/8 x 1 1/8 inches), © Hannah Black, Courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa Gallery
Info: Arcadia Missa Gallery, 35 Duke Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 20/9-1/11/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 112:00-18:00. https://arcadiamissa.com/
