To keep the High Line vibrant and growing year-round, we need 50 friends like you to join as monthly members.
When you become a monthly member before Earth Day on April 22, you’ll receive our limited-edition water bottle!
Hannah Black and Sara Magenheimer
Body Language
On the High Line at 14th Street
March 9 – April 26, 2017
Daily beginning at 5 PM
Body Language is a group exhibition in video format that focuses on two emerging artists whose video works explore the ways in which language determines and is eluded by our relationships to our bodies. While speech is inherently bodily – sculpted by our hand gestures, larynx, vocal chords, and breath emanating from the lungs – it also divides our understanding of our bodies in the world, creating distinctions that we would not necessarily otherwise perceive.
Hannah Black’s (b. Manchester, United Kingdom) The Neck (2014) bridges her memory of failing to include connecting body parts – necks, ankles, wrists – in her childhood drawings with larger political questions about mediation. Her video Team Jolie (2013) flashes between close-cropped images of Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston – subjects of a ubiquitous celebrity feud – while enumerating the personal experience of embodying stereotypical female roles, including that of “a machine for producing affection.”
Sara Magenheimer’s (b. 1981, Philadelphia) From the Movie of the Same Name (2016) marches disembodied proper names across a black screen. A jellyfish – a translucent animal whose “intelligence is in [its] body” – narrates Magenheimer’s second featured work, Best is Man’s Breath Quality (2017), raising questions about the embodied experience of animals and humans. “Do [your] habitual tensions also manifest on the inside? Are your livers furrowed like your brows? Does your heart have a groove in it from where it was badly broken?”
Organized by Melanie Kress, High Line Art Associate Curator.
Images: Hannah Black, Team Jolie, 2014. HD video, color, sound; 4 minutes, 36 seconds. Courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa. Sara Magenheimer, Best is Man’s Breath Quality, 2017. HD video, color, sound; 15 minutes, 30 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and Video Data Bank
Artist bio
Hannah Black (b. Manchester, United Kingdom) lives and works in Berlin. Black’s work has been presented at institutions including Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland (2016); 155 Freeman/Triple Canopy, New York, NY (2015), and Sala Luis Miro Quesada Garland, Lima, Peru (2015), among others. She was a studio participant on the Whitney Independent Study Program 2013 – 14 and graduated from with an MFA in Art Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2013. She is also an editor at New York-based magazine The New Inquiry.
Sara Magenheimer (b. Philadelphia, PA) lives and works in New York, NY. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at institutions including The Kitchen, New York, NY (2017); Art in General + Kim?, Riga, Latvia (2016 – 2017); COR&P, Columbus, OH (2016); JOAN, Los Angeles, CA (2015); Recess, New York, NY (2015); Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, NY (2015); and DOCUMENT, Chicago, IL (2014). Her work has been presented in group exhibitions including CCCC (Ceramics Club Cash and Carry), White Columns, New York (2015); Telepathy or Esperanto?, Futura Center for Contemporary Art, Prague (2015); and Amy Sillman: One Lump or Two, traveling to Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2014); and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2013). Her videos have been screened at venues such as Anthology Film Archives, New York (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2015); Images Festival, Toronto (2015); and The New York Film Festival (2014).
Support