Thanks to everyone who made it to our MOVEMENT! screening event yesterday and to all the artists who contributed to it. Special thanks go to Liz Rosenfeld and Simon Peatau, who attended the screenings and agreed to have a little chat with me after the films. It was a really exciting evening, and the amount of people who came and the wonderful atmosphere really encouraged me to do something like this again. If you have good ideas and suggestions for artists and art/projects, who/which could be featured in a follow-up, just write me an email!
We proudly present our first real-world event MOVEMENT!, which will take place on the May 24 at SHIFT, the new project space of Tresor Club on Köpenicker Straße between Berlin-Kreuzberg and Mitte. The event, with which we’ll celebrate our 4th birthday, aims to show different ways in which contemporary artists use music and sound in combination with dance and other body practices in order to investigate and express queer identification or dis-identification.
We will show 10 different works by artists who identify as queer, trans* and feminist, each of them working with different points of departure such as race, class, and gender. All approaches explore the intersection of the individual and the community, combining a critique towards the normalizing institutions of modern capitalistic society with utopian spirit and practice. The evening’s program ranges from short documentaries and music videos to recordings of live performances. Most of the projects were created and released within the last two years and will be screened with the kind permission of the artists.
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Posted by Hanno ON May 14, 2013 |
CATEGORY: Berlin, Film, Music, Queer Politics |
TAGS: Brontez Purnell, Chris E. Vargas, Dan Bodan, Daniel Cremer, Go! Push Pops, Liz Rosenfeld, Margaret V. Haines, Peaches, Ronique XXX, SHIFT, Simon Paetau, Tejal Shah
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M. Lamar is a New York based artist whose captivating performances have him singing on fierce piano with a gripping countertenor voice and addressing complex and at times uncomfortable themes such as slavery, the sexual aspect of lynching and their legacy. After being in various punk/goth bands and a church choir, while being classically trained, he dropped out of Yale University years ago to pursue his solo musical project and since then he has released two critically acclaimed LPs.
Speculum Orum – Shackled to the Dead is his new album and to promote it he recently played a show in Berlin. I caught up with M. Lamar at Südblock during the first leg of his tour to discuss the state of America today, black dicks, white supremacy and how he sees art.
How did you come to the decision of dropping out of your art school to pursue music?
I should say that I completed my degree in Fine Art. I went to graduate school, I went to Yale for a year where I did mostly sculpture. And I dropped out because I knew I didn’t want to be part of the bourgeois art world. And I also realised that I didn’t want to make visual art. I was going to New York to do shows and perform music in some way and along the way I was taking private voice lessons and music theory but that was just for me. I am actually part of the same festival in Stockholm as Penny Arcade and it’s funny because she is talking about the things that sort of happened in the mid 70s to 80s, all these professional artists who were determined to make money.. And I realised I really didn’t want to do that. And so I dropped out of Yale and moved back to San Francisco.
Were you trying to rebel against your upbringing or family?
No; if anything I was rebelling against society, in general and I was trying to find my people. I went to school in SF undergraduate and then went to Yale; I dropped out and then returned to SF with my people; I moved in with this sort of punk rock, goth, trans crew. That’s when my life really got going when I rejected the whole professional artist thing. I’m from Alabama originally and my mother, who is a teacher, was the first out of ten children in her family to go to college so the longing within that context was to create these very bourgeois children, who would go on to be doctors or lawyers. My mother was very disappointed because my sister also became an artist. So dropping out of Yale was me completely rejecting that longing and was also me finding my own way.
When did you got into black metal?
I came out of this goth, punk thing. I remember at first there was this boy I had a huge crush on and I don’t know how I ended up in his car and Cradle of Filth was on the stereo. And as horrible and commercial as they are now they were probably my introduction to it around 2001. It was the voice that really got me. He was doing his high singing and it really turned me on, and when I was in bands I wanted to do this high singing with this sort of heavy music.
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Bombay based queer-feminist artist Tejal Shah‘s visionary and imaginary video work “Between The Waves” was my favorite piece shown at last year’s Documenta 13 and still haunts me. The installation cosists of 5 different “cannels”, which are projected on two screens, showing goodess-like one-horned creatures in a post-civilized environment. The films follow a utopian and dystopian approach at the same time, showing a world that has obviously suffered from the collapse of the eco-system, but at the same time is imbued with new transgressive forms of spirituality, technology, gender-identity, sexuality and body practice.
If you have the chance to be in Munich in the next few weeks you will be able to “Between The Waves” it it’s full beauty, since it will be exhibited at Tejal Shah’s German gallery Barbara Gross in conjunction with Munich’s Cinema of Art week. The exhibition opens tonight (April 25th) and will run until the 1st of June. The opening includes a guided walk by the artist which will start at 6pm. You find a short video excerpt of “Between The Waves” on Vimeo and some preview pictures below.
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Artist Matthew Palladino is based in San Francisco. For more of his pictures check out his website or Flickr stream.
Photographer and Original Plumbing maker Amos Mac has sent us a collection of beautiful pictures from a photo shoot with New York City based writer, visual artist and performance artist Stephen Boyer, one of the co-founders of the The People’s Library and editor of the Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology. Stephen has just recently released his debut novel Parasite, which was published by Publication Studies in January and tells the story of a young boy, who runs away from home and becomes a sex worker in San Francisco. You can get a first impression of the book and its author by watching this recording of a reading Steven did at the St Marks Bookstore earlier this year.
The photos of Steven were taken at his home in Chelsea, where he lives in the basement of the former house of Geraldine Page and her husband and partner Rip Torn. The place is today occumpied by Page 22, an arts space managed by Page’s son Tony Torn. All pictures are courtesy Amos Mac.
New York City-based photographer Veretta Cobler‘s book New York Underground 1970-1980 offers beautiful insights into the New York club scene of the disco era and overflows with glam, glitter and sexual tension. The book, which is completely kept in black and white, was published in 2004 by Parkstone International and is currently available for a sale price of 5,00$ on Amazon.com. It is also available in German (similarly cheap) and French (a little more expensive), although it is only the photographer’s introduction that differs. Here’s a little preview:
In the summer of 2012, undergraduate student at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City, Yulan Grant, had the idea to make a zine. Her theme: a visual history of baby hairs, a technique of gel-sculpting the wispy hairs at one’s 
hairline, popular in Black and Latino culture. Given her studies in graphic design, she had no issue with the visuals, but needed writing. For this, she contacted her close friends and schoolmates at the affiliated Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, Brandon Owens and Justin Allen. Brandon wrote two haiku on the topic, and Justin, a piece of prose poetry. Before the end of the summer the zine was finished, copies printed. By fall, it had been included into traveling zine archive the POCZine Project.
Soon their zine, simply titled Baby Hair, would be traveling the country with the works of numerous other people of color that decided to bypass the publishing industry in favor of complete artistic freedom. But not before they were offered a gig by aspiring curator Johnny Sagan.
Early meetings with Sagan, under the curatorial name Snowy Wilderness, left both Grant and Allen in bewilderment. Tasks were listed off at a rapid pace and seemed both promising and abstract. The gig: Sagan, curating a series of art shows in collaboration with Brooklyn-based gallery Superchief at Lower East Side bar and gallery space Culturefix, had
gotten a hold of a copy of Baby Hair and wanted Grant and Allen to produce in house zines to accompany the gallery shows. Their first project, a zine for House of Ladosha’s show THE WHOLE HOUSE EATS.
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The video below is a recording of “The Episodes”, a performance event by Oakland based writer, zine-maker, musician (Gravy Train!!!! / The Younger Lovers) and dancer Brontez Purnell, which was held at San Francisco’s The Garage between the 7th and the 16th of March and will be shown another two times at Temescal Art Center in Oakland this weekend (24th/24th). It is presented by THEOFFCENTER.
The evening opens with a screening of the beautiful B&W short film “Free Jazz” by the Brontez Purnell Dance Company, which was founded by Brontez in 2011 and debuted with a “Free Jazz” performance piece at the Berkeley Art Museum in the same year. The film is shown to the public for the first time and was recorded as well, check out the trailer here.
What I’ve posted below is the actual “The Episodes” performance – a 30-minute piece, for which Brontez has collaborated with performers Anthony R. Lucas and Sophia Wang. The piece deals with the power of everyday routines and shakes them up, with the “ultimate goal (…) to blur, destroy, (and most importantly) recreate the sacred repetitiveness of the everyday ritual of being human” (event description). It’s a lot of fun and I recommend to take your time to watch the whole thing. For a longer review of the show please visit the blog of RADAR productions, a San Francisco-based non-profit that produces literary happenings around the Bay Area.
The evening was recorded by queer performance ethnographer Mark McBeth, who explores and documents the Bay Area performance scene with videos, interviews and photography. Check out his Vimeo page for more of his recordings and his website for information about his work.
This picture was quite popular on our Facebook page and I like it a lot, so I decided to share it here as well. It was taken by Los Angeles based photographer Catherine Opie for a Rodarte book published in 2011. You can order the publication for a reduced price via Amazon, fore more information about the book check out Artbook.com. I found the picture on the consistently amazing CruiseorbeCruised tumblr.
(c) Catherine Opie / Rodarte
“Pay It No Mind” by filmmaker Michael Kasino pays tribute to legendary New York queen and activist Marsha P. Johnson, who was one of the founders of the US gay and trans rights movement of the 60s and 70s and a central figure in the NYC gay and art scene until the early 90s. The documentary based on a late interview with Marsha and interviews with many of her friends and fellow activists recaptures different stages of her exciting (and often difficult) live such as the Stonewall Riots (which she initiated), the creation of the S.T.A.R. (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) and her role as a performer as part of the drag performance group Hot Peaches.
The interview with Marsha was recorded shortly before her mysterious death in 1992, which until today has remained an unsolved case and was just recently re-opend for investigation by the New York police (who had refused to investigate it in the last 20 years). Co-featured are gay activist Randy Wicker, former Cockettes performer Agosto Machado, Author Michael Musto, Hot Peaches founder/performer Jimmy Camicia, and Stonewall activists such as Bob Kohler, Danny Garvin, Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt and Martin Boyce. In addition to the countless number of beautiful photos the film is also accompanied by the music of Antony, whose band “The Johnsons” were named after Marsha and whose song “River of Sorrow” references her death.
“Pay It No Mind” was the screened in places such as the IFC theater in New York, the British Film Institute in London and La Mutinerie in Paris in 2012 and can now be fully streamed online. Thanks Mr. Kasino!
This reading by House of Ladosha member Juliana Huxtable was recorded at the Fag City reading event at Envoy Enterprises on October 10th 2012, and I’m happy it is online in full-length now. A text version of “Unfriendly Black Hottie (Queen Read 1+2)”, a powerful and hilarious take on everyday-transphobia and -racism (starts around 4:40), can be found on Neon Ladosha’s blog. For the second part of the reading please visit Juliana’s Vimeo page.
