At the invitation of art cinema OFFoff, Courtisane is very pleased to present a program composed of films made and chosen by artist and filmmaker Alexandra Cuesta (EC/US). Inspired as much by Walker Evans‘s reticent street photography as by Bruce Baillie’s sensuous film poems, her work manages to strike a delicate balance between the mundane and the poetic, the material and the intelligible. Public places and urban landscapes are observed in their splendor and singularity through the abstract and vernacular figures of everyday life, exploring the constructions of space and structures of time that can be found in the order and disorder of people’s daily movements and environments. These filmic portraits in motion, elegantly composed of textures of light and fragments of bodies, are reminiscent of an approach that Flaubert once referred to as an “absolute way of seeing things”, manifesting the sensible intensities of the most ordinary things, on the point of disentangling the connections that make them into functional objects. It is precisely in this point of tension that the sensibility of Alexandra Cuesta’s work is situated, perpetually oscillating between a fleeting play of correspondences and a surface of percepts and affects that is there for us to engage with.

The playful and poignant films of German filmmaker Ute Aurand, a key figure in Berlin’s experimental film scene since the 1980s, emerge from her intimate relationship with people and places. Drawing on traditions of the diary film, feminism and artisanal practices, her handcrafted 16mm films are filled with joy at the small details of life – from observations of landscapes to friends filmed over many years. Her exuberant films reflect on memory as much as they celebrate the here and now. These screenings presented by the artist will highlight the range and breadth of Aurand’s filmmaking.

Curated by George Clark, Assistant Curator Film, Tate Modern

In the history of contemporary art, the body has been a particular medium in the sense that it implies a physical engagement of the artist who is not necessarily present with other media: it isn't just action painting and the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the United States in the 50s that made us realize that the painter paints (also) with his body. With Gutai in Japan, the Vienna actionists, Fluxus and body art - or corporal art, and many other artists out of any movement, the body becomes all or part of the artistic language.

This performative body, filmed under various schemes - of the acquisition to the intimate theater,, we will give an overview of creation in the field of performance,  territory of the art or History, sexuality and gender are examined.

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