Hannah Black
The Directions
Vleeshal, Markt 1, Middelburg
26/01/2025 – 13/04/2025
Hannah Black, ‘The Directions’, 2025, Vleeshal, Middelburg. Photo: Gunnar Meier.
The Directions – Review
Text by Àngels Miralda
The beating heaviness of global violence as genocide unfolds on this planet is glaringly absent from most institutional settings that claim to represent contemporary conditions. In this banality of the everyday, lies a discomfort that many of us carry, and it is this false naiveté and uncanny calm that underlies Hannah Black’s The Directions. Through an all-encompassing architectural installation, the artist lays bare the conditions of life at this cosmic moment of unceasing onslaught by confronting the normalisation of this oppressive and horrifying truth.
I take the handout from the desk. What at first glance appears to be a floorplan is circular – an astrological chart that says “Name: Al Aqsa Flood.” It never occurred to me to do an astrological reading of an “event” of true philosophical definition. This name conveys a before and an after – one that has already radically transformed our collective identity. Sun sign, Libra, Ascendant, Libra – the sign of balance or of shifting equilibriums. Behind it, another floorplan with the layout of the Vleeshal with an order of planets suspended as in the night sky above the visitors.
Hannah Black, ‘The Directions’, 2025, Vleeshal, Middelburg. Photo: Gunnar Meier.
Inside of the Vleeshal’s open space, a wooden and metallic structure leads out to various rooms, windows, and exits like the minotaur’s labyrinth. I first encounter a framed work marked on the floor plan with the number 2, corresponding to “Works from the BKR Municipal Collection Middelburg 1949-1987.” The BKR was a basic income for artists in the Netherlands that lasted during the listed dates. In exchange for a dignified income, Dutch artists provided works to build up public collections in the post-war shadow. This programme made the Netherlands a place where artists could live dignified lives without relying on the art market, it created a boom of experimentation and sustained the practices of otherwise unviable experiments.
What does this have to do with the Al-Aqsa Flood? The corridor proceeds to two exits of the structure which both face the metaphorical outside – archival images of the destruction of Middelburg during the second world war. The viewers stand inside of an architectural frame buttressed between reminders of past ruin. During the Second World War, the city and its colonial harbour that brought enormous wealth from the enslavement of colonised people around the world, its churches, and the Vleeshal building itself were destroyed by Nazi bombs. The reconstructed walls of the exhibition space were put back together, stone by stone, creating an artifice of originality and history where it had been razed to the ground. The walls hold archival images of men in suits inspecting the rubble of their wealthy homes. These images bring home the war that never ended in many parts of the world and the suspended planets serve as a premonition of our interconnected destinies.
Hannah Black, ‘The Directions’, 2025, Vleeshal, Middelburg. Photo: Gunnar Meier.
Hannah Black, ‘The Directions’, 2025, Vleeshal, Middelburg. Photo: Gunnar Meier.
Hannah Black, ‘The Directions’, 2025, Vleeshal, Middelburg. Photo: Gunnar Meier.
‘Bright Cypress’, Hannah Black, in ‘The Directions’, 2025, Vleeshal, Middelburg. Photo: Gunnar Meier.
The structure, a shield from this exterior destruction, unfolds as a metaphor for the safeguards of socially-oriented society. Within this precarious security, the framed works accompany intimate videos filmed in dark exterior environments. Friendly chatter fills the video room while the camera captures the distant light of the universe. There is something intimate but unnerving in these dialogues, togetherness provides a brief respite. Outside of this framework is eternal ruin, a Cypress tree is a manifold reference – for mythology, for the graveyard, for poetry, for the island. All of it is draped in the mystic spheres of the orbital planets – a design for human destiny.
‘Bright Cypress’, Hannah Black, in ‘The Directions’, 2025, Vleeshal, Middelburg. Photo: Gunnar Meier.
‘Bright Cypress’, Hannah Black, in ‘The Directions’, 2025, Vleeshal, Middelburg. Photo: Gunnar Meier.
‘Bright Cypress’, Hannah Black, in ‘The Directions’, 2025, Vleeshal, Middelburg. Photo: Gunnar Meier.
As social programmes across the globe are being dismantled by extreme-right politics and artists are increasingly censored, deported, and imprisoned, the framed works of the BKR are a historical reminder of the fragility of the systems we construct. Even within these glimpses of comfort, exclusion prevails – the all-male Dutch cohort of artists signal a society where access has never been universally granted and has quickly unraveled. The walls of the structure lie half-dismantled, a skeleton designed as a ruin within ruins, marked for demolition.
This exhibition doesn’t give answers. It does however, offer a moment of catharsis in solidarity with others unable to shake the uneasiness of survival among daily reminders of ongoing unjustifiable crimes. Regardless of whether one believes in astrology, the chart serves as a metaphor for the spiritual and philosophical question of free-will. Are we active agents in our own destruction? The exhibition comes full circle – an ouroboros of biblical time that knows that a messiah has been born of the rubble of history, and in the meantime, we hold on to each other unflinchingly doling out small comforts. The Directions leaves me with the sensation of having seen an omen, an unmistakably important meditation on what it means to make art in these unthinkable times.
‘Al Aqsa Flood Event Chart’, Hannah Black, in ‘The Directions’, 2025, Vleeshal, Middelburg. Photo: Gunnar Meier.
‘Al Aqsa Flood Event Chart’, Hannah Black, in ‘The Directions’, 2025, Vleeshal, Middelburg. Photo: Gunnar Meier.
‘Al Aqsa Flood Event Chart’, Hannah Black, in ‘The Directions’, 2025, Vleeshal, Middelburg. Photo: Gunnar Meier.
‘Al Aqsa Flood Event Chart’, Hannah Black, in ‘The Directions’, 2025, Vleeshal, Middelburg. Photo: Gunnar Meier.
‘London’, Hannah Black, in ‘The Directions’, 2025, Vleeshal, Middelburg. Photo: Gunnar Meier.
‘London’, Hannah Black, in ‘The Directions’, 2025, Vleeshal, Middelburg. Photo: Gunnar Meier.
‘Marseille/Monfort’, Hannah Black, in ‘The Directions’, 2025, Vleeshal, Middelburg. Photo: Gunnar Meier.
Àngels Miralda is an Amsterdam-based curator and writer. She has been a member of Daily Lazy since 2018. She has curated many exhibitions including the Contemporary Biennial TEA 2024, two editions of Something Else: Cairo Off-Biennale, two editions of Survival Kit in Riga, Curated By Gallery Festival in Vienna, has curated group exhibitions at the Tallinn Art Hall, Museum of Contemporary Art of Chile, Radius CCA in Delft, the Museum of Angra do Heroísmo in Azores, and has curated solo exhibitions of artists including Paul Rosero Contreras, Bita Razavi, Anastasia Mina, Jinsook Shinde, Andrej Skufca, and Andrea Knezović. She has written various artist monographs published by Phaidon Press, Cukrarna, Printer Fault Press, and Grimm Gallery. She was a writer for Artforum from 2019-2023 and is currently editor-in-chief at Collecteurs.