“She was an ambassador of a new code of beauty, and kindness, and understanding, and ruthless identity transformation. Mark was someone whose work you don’t realize is so important until they are gone.”
(Still from performance “Realness”, 2011 / Quote via Video Drag)
Larusson & Pyszczek is a Canadian artist couple based in Berlin. The following pictures are a little preview of their exhibition “Your History Is Not Our History” at Dittrich & Schlechtriem, which runs until March 17. You find more exhibition views and artworks, as well as and more information about the duo and the show on the gallery website + a nice interview with the guys on BUTT Online. All photos by Sebastian Treytnar, courtesy Dittrich & Schlechtriem.
“The song was written about a sex club – everything is completely dark, you have to feel your way around. No one really sees me in the video, and if they do they’re indifferent. I walk through this house where everyone is completely self-obsessed. This video will be part of a larger narrative of videos for the album Bent.” Cody Critcheloe
The awesome queer music website Homoground is currently featuring my mixtape “Sparks”, a reminiscence to the early house era and to contemporary artists who relate to it. You can stream it below and download it over on the the Soundcloud page of my music project Scary Muscles. Playlist and download link below. I’m not a professional DJ by the way, so please forgive me if some of the transitions are a little rough. Hope you guys still like it.
Over the month of February, Tate Modern in London has been celebrating the work of pioneering film-maker Barbara Hammer with a series of screenings, events and retrospective talks. Lifted directly from the Tate website – Hammer says that ‘As an experimental filmmaker and lesbian feminist, I have advocated that radical content deserves radical form.’ – and the true erotic, sometimes carnal, sometimes touching nature of these films are a testament to that.
We Who Feel Differentlyis a beautifully designed internet project by Bogota born/ New York City based artist Carlos Motta, who has interviewed fifty queer thinkers, activists and artists from Colombia, Norway, South Korea and the United States about the history and current status of queer politics in their countries. All interviews can be streamed on the site in their original language and were also transcribed and translated into English. While they all reflect different views and approaches on topics such as sexual equality, social assimilation, gender politics, HIV/AIDS and queer arts, the project’s aim is to return to the idea of a “queer subjects” in a political sense, as Motta points out: “We Who Feel Differently attempts to reclaim a queer ‘We’ that values difference over sameness, a ‘We’ that resists assimilation, and a ‘We’ that embraces difference as a critical opportunity to construct a socially just world”. As a second step, Motta brings together the main questions and topics of the interviews in five thematic reflections, which were also released as a book with the same title last year and can be fully downloaded on the artist’s website. He also has edited the online magazine We Who Feel Differently Journal, which further investigates queer topics. The first one focusing on marriage was published in spring 2011 and can be downloaded on the website as well, I hope it wasn’t the last one.
You find more background information on WWFD by Motta himself this little video portrait of the artist by Brooklyn based filmmaker and visual artist Anna Barsan, who portrayed him for the queer online documentary project Signified (which gets its own post here very soon).
Eiri (New York City)
Angel Haze (WH, California)
Freaky Boiz (Chicago)
Bitches With Wolves (London)
