In the video Credits the audience becomes the artist and observes themselves walk around real and virtual forests. The walk, accompanied with bird whistling and bristling sound of footsteps is both full of suspense and an air of playfulness. The artist herself occasionally appears in the video wearing a nude latex-like textured mask with no mouth and an elongated nose. The mask seems to be a modern take on the medieval Schandmaske (shame mask) that was used to silence offenders, who disrupted social order (more often women who disobeyed their husbands). These masks as Hannah points out in the video posed as links between social shame and physical attribute and were supposed to encourage the wearers to think about their place in society. The video is in general inspired by the medieval practice of shaming through public humiliation and addresses notions of debt in different historical contexts.

Throughout the video seemingly random sentences and imagery bounce up and down the screen – the artist seems to throw around the clues that the viewer has to piece together to follow Hannah Black’s trail of thoughts, of an artist whose work is always infiltrated with witty references to the Marxist, feminist and black radical theories. The video states ‘PROPERTY AS LAW; PROPERTY AS SAFETY’ acknowledging the supreme values in capitalism and then the anxieties associated with it follow; ‘the risk of not paying the debt interest on time, missing the repayments, damaging ratings, being stripped off the only security – one’s property, feeling one’s body as a burden…‘ These are the realities of today’s living that deepen racial, societal and economic inequalities.

The video is full of references to violent social practices that were once taken as a norm, hinting maybe one day capitalism and its methods of regulating will be deemed as scandalously offensive as the 19th century the study of Eugenics. The feeling of a possible change is further intensified with random appearance of Doggerland, a now-sunken piece of land that once connected Great Britain to the mainland Europe. Both digital constructions and maps of the land come to signify historical moment of different societal order, free from concepts of credit and debt, as well as inevitability of change.

The video is superimposed with Zura Tsopurashvili’s photographic print Old. The photo depicts an average looking Georgian man sitting in an armchair, in quite a standard-looking Caucasian interior. However, the man has a laser ray pointed at his forehead. Common trope of thriller movies, the man seems to be in danger he is not aware of. The sight is uncannily linked with the social vulnerabilities that the video Credits is concerned with.

Hannah Black (born 1981, Manchester) lives and works in New York. Her art addresses questions of race, gender, class, pop culture, and capital, among other things. Hannah completed her MFA at Goldsmiths, in 2013 and was a studio participant on the Whitney International Study Programme in New York from 2013 to 2014. Her work in video and installation has been exhibited at a number of museums and galleries including the New Museum and Interstate Projects (NY), mumok, Vienna, Arcadia Missa, DRAF (London) and Chateau Shatto (LA), and readings/performances have taken place at many venues including the Whitechapel, the Showroom and Cafe Oto (London), Flutgraben and Societe (Berlin) and Cage, the New Museum, PS1 MoMA and Lisa Cooley (New York). As part of a performance project with the musician Bonaventure, she has played at the ICA, the Berlin Biennale. Her writing has been published in The New Inquiry, Artforum, Texte zur Kunst and Frieze (DE), among other magazines, and in her book Dark Pool Party (Dominica/Arcadia Missa).

Zura Tsopurashvili (b. 1992) studied at the CCA-Tbilisi between 2014-2015, where he obtained his informal masters degree. His multimedia practice is noteworthy in its unique sensuality and distinguished approach to the immediate surroundings of the artist. His photos, often devoid of humans, are imbued with anticipation of actions yet to take place. Zura’s art has been exhibited around Georgia.