Barbara Hammer : DIGNITY at KOW Gallery Berlin
Wednesday, 20 March 2013 12:44
The experimental filmmaker, documentarist, and visual artist Barbara Hammer, who was born in Hollywood in 1939, has created one of the most influential oeuvres of Queer Cinema. Over the course of a lifetime, the pioneering lesbian film activist has put together a comprehensive manifesto of feminist perspectives. Their first solo exhibition of Barbara Hammer’s work, in 2011, emphasized her contributions to the (self-)representation of lesbian love and sexuality in the 1970s; in this new show, by contrast, we focus on a parallel strand in her oeuvre that commences in the mid-1980s: Hammer’s engagement with illness, aging, and death.
The centerpiece of the exhibition, which was designed in collaboration with the artist, is “Sanctus” (1990). Hammer uses moving X-ray pictures Dr. James Sibley Watson produced in the 1950s that capture—usually female—bodies in motion.(1) Watson had turned his study subjects’ bodies into a spectacle, subjecting them to visualization and medico-technical manipulation that cut to the quick; Hammer exalts these bodies, presenting them now as threatened, now as threatening, restoring their sensual presence. She copies, crops, and cross-fades Watson’s archival footage, painting on it and using chemicals to burn it. Hammer animates a danse macabre of female skeletons. This is more than a feminist and erotic reappropriation of the female body beset by technology and pathology—it is its canonization, supported on the original soundtrack by the composer Neil B. Rolnick’s computer-generated mass “Sanctus.”(2)
Like “Sanctus,” “Optic Nerve” (1985), Barbara Hammer’s contribution to the 1987 Whitney Biennial, is a principal work of her experimental practice. The film is based on 8 mm footage showing her 97-year-old grandmother. Physical decline, the life-sustaining function of medical equipment, the sense of being at the mercy of time and technology: Hammer figuratively applies these to her own use of the celluloid material and the creation of the soundtrack. The result is a disturbing dovetailing of the physiological and filmic apparatuses. The grandmother’s blindness in one eye, her loss of spatial vision, leads Hammer to the limits of her medium, away from the naturalism of three-dimensional visualization and toward an existential minimalism: “Optic Nerve” turns into a flickering, hazy, mechanical conglomerate, a filmic portrait on the edge of vision.
In “Vital Signs” (1991), Barbara Hammer demonstratively transforms the horror of death into its opposite. She tenderly cares for a human skeleton, feeding it, dressing and caressing it, taking it for walks in the dark cabaret of an intimate relationship beyond death. She confronts pain and fear rather than repressing them. In 1986, she makes “Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of AIDS,” in which she examines the public ignorance, stigmatization, and instrumentalization of illness and death. For “8 in 8” (1994), which criticizes the media’s coverage of breast cancer, the artist shoots her own interviews with patients. In a programmatic act, she transfers newspaper reports about rising cancer rates, therapies, their consequences and marketing onto bones.
In 2008, her perspective shifts. “A Horse Is Not a Metaphor”(3) documents her own struggle with cancer. Hammer shoots inside the hospital, where she herself is now an object in the medical apparatus; filming serves her as a way to maintain her own subjecthood. The digital handheld camera coolly registers her ailing and swollen body under clinical observation. The film “is an undisguised bit of activism, a frank plea for survival, and an everyday chronicle of what a person must endure.”(4) Hammer’s presenting herself in this fashion is not an act of narcissism. Since the early 1970s, her films have put a feminist demand that is also a core piece of democratic culture into practice: if no representation is available in which you recognize yourself, then represent yourself.
From her first films (X, Dyketactics, Superdyke), her audacity express itself in the enthusiastic and lyrical exploration of sexuality and female pleasure, until then terra incognita in the geography of cinema. For this, she invents new formal representations associating flowers and plants blooming (Women I Love) to a symbolic vocabulary close to surrealism, revealing its admirative proximity with Claude Cahun and Maya Deren (I Was / I Am Psychosynthesis) to which she devotes two recent works (Maya Deren's Sink and Lover Other: Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore). The creative energy of Barbara Hammer use all the measures from the very rich technical syntax of avant-garde cinema : overprint, lamination of images, visual collage, coloring or alteration of the film, unframing, solarization and negative effect, handling to shooting or to post-production, until transform the movie into a poetic form by manipulating the film under our eyes (Endangered). All these technical effects contribute to the deployment of a work rich in radiant colors, sounds more cleverly worked (Generations). Even in his many films shot in black and white, Barbara Hammer is a light and perceptual experiments filmmaker. She is also very attentive to the musical accompaniment of her films: music, sound effects that give color, tone, sometimes lyrical and sometimes humoristic to films that accompany the memories we hold.
You can enjoy this exhibition until April, 14th 2013 at KOW Gallery Berlin
Brunnenstr. 9, 10119 Berlin
Phone +49 (0)30 311 66 77 -0
gallery[@]kow-berlin.com
39 @ MINDPIRATES on friday, 22nd march
Monday, 18 March 2013 15:41
Mindpirates is an artist group that works on aspects and issues of contemporary culture, sociology and ecology. The group has the approach to work independently and interdisciplinary. They combine challenging aesthetics, substantial examination and experiment with new forms of distribution, exposition and cooperation.
Mindpirates e.V. is a member based network. The e.V. is building and developing a community that supports ideas and projects with the Mindpirates.
Mindpirates Vereinsheim is organized by the Mindpirates e.V. based in Berlin. The space follows the tradition of an artist run center and is used by its members as a platform for mutual exchange and public presentation.
Mindpirates Projektraum is an independent art space and a curatorial platform for the collaborative production and presentation of artistic projects, exhibitions and critical research work. It is a meeting place for the exchange of thoughts and impulses through which to forge relationships with the guest artists and the public.
Thirty9 is an electronic vocal improvisation duo based in Berlin. Their performances are the perfect balance between being a concert and an installation.
“39″
The pair consists of Jens Christian Madsen, an electronics from Tjaere+Fjer and Martin Bernt who is from THE POOL. At a “39″ performance you will experience songs being composed through improvisational techniques. Both artists have implemented snippets from their works into their respective groups material. Be the first to hear the sound of the future in the making, right here at Mindpirates.
39 is based in Berlin.
39 is Jens & Martin.
39 improvises only.
39 don't plan.
39 don't think.
Only sounds and music.
Latest sounds by thirtynineberlin
Tjaere+Fjer is a Berlin based one-man-band formed 2009 in Berlin by Danish musician, producer, and sound artist Jens Christian Madsen (b. 1972). The band name Tjaere+Fjer (pronounced roughly: Chair-uh-Fear) is Danish for ”Tar and Feathers”. Tjaere+Fjer makes alternative electronic pop – or Adventurous Beat Music, as the band likes to label it.
Jens considers Tjaere+Fjer as an actual band and not a solo-project (even though he’s the only member). Therefore he sometimes uses the “we”-term when speaking on behalf of the band! The stage line-up will expand when Tjaere+Fjer goes live in 2013.
Tjaere+Fjer wants to challenge the common perception of pop, beat, and alternative music – for instance by experimenting with writing and recording methods, by pursuing certain significant sound aesthetics (for instance a found-sound/garage-like flavor), and by creating alternative song arrangements and album flows.
Latest sounds by Tjaere+Fjer
On friday, 22nd of march, Come at Mindpirates and live a outstanding sensorial and mystical experience in an old grain silo in the heart of Kreuzberg. The unique space is characterized by its geometric architecture ideal to create an introspective atmosphere.
You can check the event on Facebook here : https://www.facebook.com/events/145011548998024/
Giorgia Fioro, humanity and spirituality.
Wednesday, 13 March 2013 15:25
Giorgia Fiorio was born in Italy in Turin on 23 July 1967. Graduated from the International Center of Photography in New York and the World Press Photo Masterclass, Giorgia Fioro is a freelance photographer and author of several books, which is working on long-term projects of "photographic research". Among his favorite themes: men. Photographed by the world, the male is the subject of various reports, exhibitions and publications as "Etre Torero" in 1997, "American Firemen" in 1998 or "Hommes de la mer" in 2001. Prepared between 2000 and 2007, the project "The Donation" comes to turn into images, a reflection about the fervor and religious practices of all countries. Scenes of prayers, rituals, or pilgrimages, Giorgia Fiorio offers a curious and poetic look about humanity, true theme of his work.
In 1990, Giorgia Fiorio continues a project of ten years around closed communities of men in Western society. These missions are concluded by the publication of several monographies collected in the anthology Des Hommes, published in 2001 by Editions Marval. By the male body, she illustrates the passing of the face of adversity. Legionnaires, bullfighters, minor or fishermen are shown before and during exercise, fight, in these moments of anticipation or transcendence of endangerment.
As soon as this project is completed, in January 2000, Giorgia Fioro began a new photographic research work, which for nine years, lead her through thirty different countries in five continents: The Donation. Visual account and both personal quest, the project is centered around the relationship between the individual and the sacred and the spiritual heritage of humanity.
In 2009 this vast project is concluded and is the subject of an exhibition at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie and at Calcografía Nazionale - Palazzo Fontana di Trevi in Rome. Together a book is published in Italy, Germany, Greece, and France, as the title The Don, published by Actes Sud.
These two major projects have been equiped with many prices and published in worldwide by magazines such as Geo (editions: France / Germany / Italy / Spain / Russia) and International Geo, Stern, El Pais, Le Monde, The Independent, the Telegraph, Venerdì di Repubblica, Panorama and also in Asahi Camera in Japan, Photography Magazine in Korea and Photographic Review in China.
Giorgia Fiorno teaches regularly at the International Center of Photography in New York and since 2003, heads the International Reflexions Masterclass seminar.
"The Mens"
San Pietro, Sardegna, Italia (1999)
Portopalo di Capo Passero, Sicilia, Italia (1999)
Guyane (1995)
Sanlucar de Barrameda, Spagna (1996)
"The Donation"
Khaik-Hti-Yo, Santuario Della Roccia d’Oro Myanmar (2003)
Foci Del Gange, Sagar Island, Golfo Del Bengala, India (2001)
Menaka, Mali (1998)
Villaggio Rang Suk Suk Isola Di Pentecoste (2004)
Tempio Jui tui, Thailandia (2005)
Cattedrale Di San Giorgio Lalibela, Etiopia (2000)
Moschea Alaattin Cami, Konya, Turchia (2004)
Ryoan-Ji, Hojo Garden, Kyoto, Giappone (2006)
Gange, Kumb-Mela, Allahabad, India (2001)
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