MIDDELBURG.- From January 26 to April 13, 2025, you can visit the solo exhibition The Directions by Hannah Black at Vleeshal. The exhibition is curated by Roos Gortzak.

For her solo exhibition at Vleeshal, Hannah Black has developed an immersive installation, consisting of a maze, a cypress, a text, chains, planets, videos, photos, and a selection of artworks from the municipal collection of Middelburg. The premise through all of this is, as the title suggests, navigation. Black explores how one moves through a world in crisis. What directions can you take? What guides you along the way?

The maze at Vleeshal offers limited outcomes: ruin, ruin, ruin, and in one case, a door. In the three videos displayed in the maze, Black engages in a conversation with herself under a starry sky about the directions she has taken so far. Stars serve as anchor points in both astrology and astronomy. They also refer to the history of Middelburg: the invention of the telescope by Hans Lipperthey in 1608 took place in Middelburg. The telescope made navigation at sea easier and left a lasting impact on the colonial past of Zeeland.

Anyone who looks up in Black’s exhibition will see gleaming chains that, together with the planets, represent the astrological birth chart for October 7, 2023. This exhibition, like all today, was made against a background of incomprehensible ruin and killing in Gaza and elsewhere. No substantive political perspective is offered in the exhibition but it raises the question of how we might build a life between the hyperpersonal and the cosmic.

This is not only a spiritual question, but also an economic one. The interior of the maze presents several artworks that were given to the municipality of Middelburg in exchange for a basic income. This took place as part of the artists’ basic income scheme that ran from 1949 to 1987 throughout the Netherlands. What does an artist need to be sure of their existence? Is a life without precarity even conceivable anymore?

Fantasies about the future cannot exist without fantasies about the past. The exhibition also relates to the Gothic building of Vleeshal, which was restored in the 19th century by architect Pierre Cuypers. Not to its original state, but as Cuypers thought it should have been. In the 1950s the building was restored again, this time from the ruins of World War II. Destruction, reconstruction, destruction, reconstruction: what does the building teach us about ways to shape our own life? About the directions we can still take?