Barbara Hammer will show six of her films related to the works on paper currently exhibited at KOW, and she will give insight in her artistic methodologies as a feminist filmmaker. 

A pioneer of queer experimental and documentary filmmaking, Barbara Hammer has helped write the history of feminist cinema. In more than eighty works, she increased the visibility of lesbian love and sexuality and encouraged lesbian women to choose self-determined lives. Born in Hollywood in 1939, the feminist activist picked up the camera in 1968 to propose alternative visions that sharply contrasted with the prevailing filmic languages, in which a male and heterosexual gaze predominated. She often broke new ground both with her themes and narrative forms and in her aesthetic experiments. Over almost five decades, her art has continually surprised fans and—no doubt deliberately—defied social clichés and conventions.

Everyday millions of hand-held self-portraits, or ‘selfies’, are uploaded on to the internet. With today’s personal technologies, private self-representations-made-public seem symptomatic of Guy Debord's ‘Society of the Spectacle’ or Jean Baudrillard’s ‘Simulacra and Simulation’. Yet for decades, experimental filmmakers and video artists have interrogated questions of self-identity and -referentiality. With the performing body as the site of action produced in relation to the film apparatus and video system, they offer a powerful critique of the male gaze and, in turn, the seeming narcissism at the center of today’s ‘selfie’ culture. A diverse range of artists and traditions have thereby subversively taken up subjective, first-person cinema and issues of self-performance in order to explore questions of identity, power, memory, and the construction of the self. ‘Mirror Me’ presents a selection of musings on the mirroring of the ‘self’ in self-reflexive film and video auto-portraits and personal diary films in order to weave together something of a ‘pre-history’ of the ‘selfie’.

Curated by Pascal Richard and Christopher Zimmerman

As part of the Free to Love: Cinema of the Sexual Revolution series
Filmmaker Barbara Hammer will appear in person to introduce her work and hold a post-screening discussion.

Programme:
- A Gay Day (USA, 1973, 16mm, 3 min.)
- Menses (USA, 1974, 16mm, 4 min.)
- Dyketactics X 2 (USA, 1974, 16mm, 8 min.)
- Women I Love (USA, 1976, 16mm, 27 min.)
- Multiple Orgasm (USA, 1977, 16mm, 10 min.)
- Double Strength (USA, 1978, 16mm, 15 min.)
- No No Nooky TV (USA, 1987, 16mm, 10 min.)

Free to Love: The Cinema of the Sexual Revolution has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage

Light Industry presents a double-bill of sapphic autoethnography from the 1980s, featuring work by pioneering lesbian artists Barbara Hammer and Cecilia Dougherty.

Barbara Hammer’s Audience is a fascinating deep cut from the director’s prodigious filmography. Relatively raw in its design, this 16mm diary of audience reactions at retrospectives of Hammer’s work in San Francisco, London, Toronto, and Montreal in the early 1980s bears none of the distinctive visual flourishes and essayistic form one usually finds in her filmmaking. Instead, it comes closer to the original ideal of cinéma vérité as seen in Chronicle of a Summer; informed by the consciousness-raising groups of the feminist movement, the artist herself acts as a catalyst for discussion, rather than fly-on-the-wall observer. Today, Audience serves as an invaluable historical archive, providing quick but complex portraits of lesbian scenes in different cities and countries: the San Francisco women are bold and raucous, treating Hammer like a celebrity; the London crowd more reserved and tentative; the Canadians politely critical after initial hesitation. It also functions as a testament to the power of Hammer herself as a figure in lesbian culture, showing how fully she engages audiences to incite new forms of discourse about representation.