In The Directions at Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, Middelburg, the artist explores the financial precarity of militarised late capitalism and potential modes of survival
When a show is called ‘literal’, to hear and to use that term can be a criticism of the work. The disparagement comes from a notion that the literal work behaves something like a dead end, leaving no space for viewers to make their own interpretation. But The Directions is a show that embodies the sense of having no way forward, so that to describe it as literal is to propose that the show could be thought of as a map of a familiar anxious feeling: when it becomes clear that sustaining life in a given structure is no longer feasible.
Inside Vleeshal, a maze of corridors is constructed from metal beams and plasterboard. But some walls are missing, and parts of the structure’s floors are absent, revealing the gallery’s floor below. Where the pathways come to dead ends are three videos of starry nights and voiceover reflections, recorded in places that Hannah Black has lived – New York, London, Marseille/Montfort (all works 2024–25). At other points inside the maze hang a collage, a drawing and two paintings from the BKR Municipal Collection Middelburg, a sort of early artists’ basic income scheme that ran in the Netherlands from 1949 to 1987, along with photographs of the destruction of Middelburg during the Second World War. In this unfinished structure’s courtyard is a potted cypress (Bright Cypress), a tree that symbolises the transition between life and death, between living and the underworld. The pot is marked ‘wrong world’ in bright red paint. And above the structure are the celestial bodies: modelled replicas of the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn. Black has arranged these into the constellation of where they were in the sky on 7 October 2023. The artist provides alongside the printed chart a text of her own that connects the Palestinian struggle for liberation to the ‘historical ironies’ that beleaguer the psycho-cognitive inner world of an individual self living inside ‘the gigantically dying colony’ that is modern Europe, which for example built its postwar identity on championing human rights and condemning genocide, while now funding several genocides across the world.
In astrology, planetary alignment can be used to connect individual realities to the broader experiences of generations. The Directions functions much like an astrological reading, of how it feels to be in the creative class in this contemporary moment, in Europe, experiencing the financial precarity of militarised late capitalism (albeit from a position of privilege), watching multiple genocides through a computer screen and wondering, ‘How are any of us going to survive this?’ Black poses this malaise, in a text included in the exhibition, as ‘not only a spiritual question, but also an economic one’. Through inclusion of the works from the Middelburg collection, she draws on an example of an earlier, abandoned economic support infrastructure for artists and attempts to find a way through a period of existential and economic crisis in Europe. The Directions functions as a constellation of the gaps that exist between what Marxist, anti-colonial and psychoanalytic theories each suggest for resolving the ongoing crisis that the creative class is experiencing today, as we gain awareness of what has lain beneath our economic survival: colonial order, in place in Europe since the Second World War, which is now being exposed for its dead ends.
The Directions at Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, Middelburg, through 13 April
From the April 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
