Fri., May 10 | 8:30 p.m. | Kinoteka 3
Opening of the retrospective “Barbara Hammer: Queer Cinema Pioneer, Icon, Activist”
before the screening of Block 1. “Radical content requires radical form”: Barbara Hammer's short films
Partners: Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; Lambda Warszawa; QueerMuzeum
The artist's early works, created in the 1970s, which make up the majority of the films presented in the block accompanying the meeting, mark their place in the history of cinema as pioneering because of the introduction of the lesbian body and eroticism to the screen – a space which lesbians had hitherto been virtually excluded from. They combine intimacy and the experience of women touching their bodies with a political message. The meeting will also serve as an introduction to Barbara Hammer's later films. Throughout her career, in experimental and documentary films, photographs, drawings, collages and performances, she has posed questions about the cultural and socio-historical constructions of lesbian identity, the fluidity of sexual identity, queer identity and the depiction of queer communities.
Guest:
dra Krystyna Mazur – co-curator of the Barbara Hammer retrospective at the 21st MDAG. Cultural and American Studies scholar. Her book "Poetry and Repetition" was published by Routledge in 2005. Her main research areas are American literature and film and queer studies. She is a lecturer at the Centre for American Studies at the University of Warsaw. Her book on Barbara Hammer, “What a Body Can Do: Barbara Hammer in the Seventies”, will be released this year by Palgrave Macmillan.
