Conversation with Constantina Zavitsanos and Hannah Black. Hannah Black is a conceptual visual artist and writer. Her work spans video, text and performance and draws on communist, feminist, and afropessimist theory, autobiographical fragments, and pop music Hannah Black’s video installation, Beginning, End, None, takes the cell, the building block of all living organisms, as its starting point. Questioning the classic analogy of the cell as “factory,” Black explores the ideological aura of this comparison, which implicitly naturalizes the factory and commodifies the cell. Using found, personal, and laboratory footage, Black explores the leakiness of metaphoric and real transmissions between concepts of biology and society. Constantina Zavitsanos is a conceptual feminist artist. Her works are organized around themes of planning, contingency, debt, dependency and care. Zavitsanos is a part of disability community as a care provider and recipient. She is a recipient of the 2015 Wynn Newhouse Award presented to disabled artists. At The New Museum between March and September 2015, she curated a series of collaborative events with artists Reina Gossett, Park McArthur, Caroline Key, and Soyoung Yoon, and academics Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, and Denise Ferreira da Silva.
New York City, NY; NYC