Sekula beyond Sekula: Films by Jennifer Chan and Hannah Black

Jennifer Chan
Equality, 2015. 14:49 minutes.

Hannah Black
The Fall of Communism, 2014. 5:23 minutes.
Credits, 2016. 10 minutes.

This week’s film selection combines two artists Jennifer Chan and Hannah Black, whose practices in different ways address race, class, and gender relations.

Equality is a film by Jennifer Chan, an artist working predominantly in video and new media. Equality is compiled and remixed from various sources – geological scenes and a melting arctic; Hollywood movies like Baraka (1992) and Day After Tomorrow (2004) with footage of waves crashing onto and flooding cities; art historical imagery; internet clips of animals; and promotional videos from a high school’s diversity campaign. The spoken word narration, pulled from Liam Gillick’s Everything Goes Good (2008), imbues these emotional film clips with an analysis of contemporary political moment. Through this commentary overlaid with text and symbols, Chan satirizes the media?s portrayal of equality and highlights the need for a dramatic redistribution of both wealth and power.

Drawing from Marxist, feminist, and black radical theory artist and writer Hannah Black?s practice similarly critiques hegemonic structures. In The Fall of Communism we plunge into a jagged sinkhole cut into an image of the street and fall through the asphalt tube of the sinkhole-cum colon to the center of the world. The musical score is an unsettling pitch-bent version of Whitney Houston?s I Will Always Love You, and the film is narrated by the morphing voices reciting monologues that annotate the descent in feet below sea level and describe conditions of alienations and the process of coming to terms with their gendered and raced subject position. In Credits (2016), Black references medieval Schandmaske, or shame masks, that were used as humiliation devices – often comprised with exaggerated and racialized facial features – meant to ostracize and persecute individuals deemed unfit for moral social life. In Credits Black correlates contemporary social stigmas to the economic and political structures like debt and inequality, which usually exacerbate them. Through the film we follow Black as she – shrouded in an adapted Schandmaske herself – moves through a wooded forest and confrontationally interacts with the camera as it follows and tracks her body.