Hannah Black: My Bodies - 4:3

Hannah Black: My Bodies - 4:3

Search
Login or sign up

Hannah Black: My Bodies

Short Films

4 min

It’s not fun writing about Hannah Black’s work, because she is herself such an exceptional writer as well as being an artist (not that the two vocations are necessarily separate things, Black has spoken about how she doesn’t view them as discrete categories). For My Bodies, Black used the results of a Google image search for CEOs to create a video that plays like a PowerPoint: each generic image of a suited man fades into the next. Samples of mainly African American women - including Rihanna, Beyonce and Aaliyah - singing “my body” play over the top; encouraging us to consider which bodies get to be visible, and have agency. (Maybe strangely, this piece always makes me think of the Nina Simone song, Ain't Got No, I Got Life).

Holly Connolly

title

x

title

Body Language

Flyer for event Connected.

Connected

A dystopian short film starring Pamela Anderson

Flyer for event Hannah Black: My Bodies.

Hannah Black: My Bodies

For 'My Bodies', Black used the results of a Google image search for CEOs to create a video that plays like a PowerPoint.

Flyer for event Corps Étranger.

Corps Étranger

An artist's internal organs and fluids on vivid display in video 'Corps Étranger'

Flyer for event Jacolby Satterwhite: Reifying Desire 3.

Jacolby Satterwhite: Reifying Desire 3

In his Reifying Desire series, Satterwhite inserted his own body into digital worlds that he constructed based on his late mother Patricia’s drawings. Because he uses green screens, rather than an entirely digitally created avatar, he has to physically act out the scenarios he depicts; in a sense he’s presenting a real body within a computer generated space. Satterwhite’s work is queer in the most obvious sense. He depicts queer sex, references leather fetish and voguing, and the six pieces which make up Reifying Desire are structured around a queered gestation cycle. But more than this, his approach both to the medium he uses, and to familial relationships, is inherently queer. Satterwhite turned to digital animation having found that he needed to reject painting because of the history of oppression attached to it. His mother suffered from schizophrenia, and there’s an uncommon intimacy in using the drawings she produced as the foundation for his work.

Flyer for event Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation.

Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation

“My fatness could not be replicated”, Perry’s avatar tells us during Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation, a statement which asks us to consider the gulf between physical reality and digital reality, and what might get left out, or perfected out, of cyber representation. Arthur Jafa has called Perry’s oeuvre, an ‘un-body of work’, a description which encapsulates how her work navigates a very contemporary detachment from the physical body, while still being body-centric. Her recent show at the Serpentine used 3D avatars and videos of digitally manipulated skin to consider how race and gender play out in online culture and theoretically disembodied space. Holly Connolly

Flyer for event Pina Bausch: Walzer.

Pina Bausch: Walzer

There’s very little of what conventional wisdom would call dancing in this clip. We know the woman can dance, because occasionally she’ll swing a leg (or a chair) with the honed fluidity that only a dancer’s body has. But, as is characteristic of the choreographer Pina Bausch’s work, this doesn’t quite feel like a dance performance. Fittingly, there’s no English translation for Tanztheater, the experimental Weimar Germany artform that Bausch reinvented in the early ‘70s. Defined by its spirit of invention and hybrid approach: it’s theatre, it’s dance, and it’s art. This willingness to go beyond the boundaries of convention, and her understanding of humour, tension and surprise is what makes Bausch’s work so intriguing, and so seminal. Great dance, whether it’s onstage or in a nightclub, is idiosyncratic; no amount of technical skill can substitute for the personality to improvise. Holly Connolly

Flyer for event Cardi B: performing pregnant at Coachella.

Cardi B: performing pregnant at Coachella

Cardi B’s daughter has arrived! And she is called Kulture. Selfishly, I’m slightly sad because this means she’s no longer pregnant, and pregnant Cardi B has been a joy to watch. She eschewed the long-established practice of the static magazine cover, instead announcing she was pregnant in a Saturday Night Live appearance. She talked publicly about how she’d considered an abortion. She kept up a hectic schedule of performances, in one she goes; “that’s how I got pregnant y’all”, while twerking. On Instagram she showed off her “brand new titties”. Pregnant Cardi B was sexy (when is she not?), but she was also extremely visible. This speaks to a wider, if not trend, then renewed cultural focus on motherhood; from New York-based fashion label Eckhaus Latta sending a pregnant model down the runway in 2017 to Sheila Heti’s new book Motherhood. Holly Connolly

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

title

x

Boiler Room
About
Editorial
SoundCloud
Instagram
YouTube
TikTok
Facebook
Apple Music

Projects
True Music
Broadcast Lab
BR X
SYSTEM
Energy
4:3

Information
Brand Partnerships
Accessibility
Support
Careers
Purchase Terms & Conditions
Privacy Policy
Cookie Policy
Website Terms Of Use
Open Dance Floor Policy

© 2026 BOILER ROOM

Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on film screenings and residencies.

Email

You can opt out anytime. We will treat your information with respect. For more information about our privacy practices please read Boiler Room's Privacy Policy. By clicking above, you agree that we may process your information in accordance with these terms.