Hannah Black

The point of departure for Hannah Black’s video installation Beginning, End, None is the building block of all life: the biological cell. Black questions how the cell is often compared with the factory for educational purposes. She shows how this comparison implicitly represents the factory as something natural and at the same time equates the cell with a trade commodity—a viewpoint that now has become reality through today’s biotechnology. She explores the human body’s status as a production site through combining filmed material from a number of different sources. The video’s dissolution of boundaries between personal, scientific, and historical images reflects how metaphorical and actual links between biology and society are influenced by and leak into one another. By taking up the Latin name for cell, cellula, which means “little room,” Black builds a fragmented story in which the cell is linked together with prisons, slave ships, and industrial manufacturing.