The sonic fabric of 2nd Person, [originally] a multi-channel video installation, is formed through an array of women’s voices orchestrated as parallel tracks in a musical composition. The speakers, all women I have intimately known at different points in my life -- my child, my mother, my best friends, students, mentors -- talk with me about aging, growing up, death, motherhood, love and loss.
A lonely dowager's last, desperate fling at reactivating her long dormant libido leads her on a path toward depravity and lurking danger.
Chief Pedro Mãmãindê (who directed the proceedings and the shoot itself) describes the necessity of strengthening the girls of his village by secluding them after their first menses. After several months, the village throws a party, with singing, feasting, and the ritual abduction of the girl by an allied village. When the Nambiquara of Mato Grosso see videotape of themselves performing this ritual, the excess of Western clothing makes them uncomfortable. The ritual is then re-enacted with traditional body painting and adornment.
In 1939, Westinghouse made a film about a small-town family visiting the New York World's Fair. Trapped inside that film was a completely different film that shows a mysterious alternate universe, revealed by Bryan Boyce’s own patented brand of narrative deconstruction and evisceration.The outcome is an absurd and chilling drama of a family transfixed by the technological wonders that would soon transform consumer society.
Ming Wong creates videos that explore performance and issues of race and gender. Born in Singapore of Chinese heritage, and now based in Berlin, his work examines cross-cultural experiences by appropriating scenes of iconic world cinema. Wong casts himself anachronistically as the star, critically exposing the otherness of the relationship of media and world history.
"Exhibitons, whether of objects or people, are displays of the artifacts of our disciplines. They are for this reason also exhibits for those who make them, no matter what their ostensible subject. The first order of business is therefore to examine critically the conventions guiding ethnographic display..."
- Destination Culture by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998
Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (English Version) is an experimental documentary about "The Western Hostage Crisis." The crisis refers to the abduction and detention of Westerners like Terry Anderson, and Terry Waite in Lebanon in the 80s and early 90s by "Islamic militants." This episode directly and indirectly consumed Lebanese, U.S., French, and British political and public life, and precipitated a number of high-profile political scandals like the Iran-Contra affair in the U.S.
In From Fagtasia to Frisco, Brenda and Glennda report from Fagtasia, an event honoring the Summer Solstice in New York organized by the Radical Faeries. Through interviews with Faeries and footage of their walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, the group proposes to reclaim the city as a safe space for queer people, and discuss reorienting queer consciousness toward spirituality.
Two guys with their heads in the clouds and their feet in the mud of the world, can not be Angels until their earthbound urges are tamed. Despite the overwhelming odds against this, the handsome, hot blooded boys are determined to earn their 'halos' and win their heavenly 'wings'.
Wittnerchrome, Exacto Knife, Typewriter
The filmmaker films herself masturbate the object of debate. She hears others claim her body, her habits: those in her conservative surroundings as a child. The viewer claims her as well, by watching her in this private act. She is 9 years old, then 12. She observes popular icons, dismissing the agency of their body, she then rejects the other, objects outside of her body: with some teenage angst, denies climax to everyone else but herself.
In the solar system 18 SCORPII, located some 45.3 light years from Earth at the northern edge of the Scorpius constellation, two planets have evolved cultures of profound mutual symbiotic reliance. The ecstatic dance-like interaction between the almost inert Kalataka and the exhausted but entranced Tarzanians, is extraordinarily beautiful, building to the climactic effusion of Kalataka sporge.
Produced in Tempe, Arizona this cosmic symbiosis is rendered with the help of masks, costumes, and campy visual effects.
Flat is Beautiful is an experimental live-action cartoon using masks, animation, subtitles, drawings, and dramatic scenes to investigate the psychic life of an androgynous eleven-year-old girl. Growing up in a working class neighborhood with her single mother and gay roommate, Taylor confronts the loneliness of living between masculine and feminine in a culture obsessed with defining gender difference. Shifting between black and white film and grainy pixelvision video, Flat is Beautiful explores the internal and external worlds of sad people.
Ecstasy Unlimited is an engaging video essay on the social construction of sexuality. Kipnis attempts to historicize pleasure and politicize desire, to reveal within the current discourse on sex — and within an ensemble of current sexual practices — the production of forms of sexuality that work to guarantee social order, rather than subvert it. Through various narrative ploys and theoretical tactics, the tape attempts to recover traces of a "political unconscious" in contemporary social malaise.
Poet Leticia Plotkin's final poem, intended to praise the ancient deities who control one's fate, turns instead into a bitter damnation scribbled in venom.
"I made Take Off in my studio apartment on Myra Avenue during my second year living in Los Angeles. As a member of the Feminist Studio Workshop, I was writing an essay at the time comparing male artists’ representations of their sexuality with female artists’. Vito Acconci was my model for a male perspective. I had been captivated by his videotapes; particularly Undertone, where he was supposed to be masturbating while seated at a table. The videotape was my ultimate response and commentary on Acconci as well as an expression of my own sexuality."
— Susan Mogul
Grappling with a latent gas mask fetish, in Less Lethal Fetishes Cuthand muses on art world political controversies, toxic emissions from the petrochemical industry, and complicity in repression and pollution as an artist enmeshed in an art and film industry propped up by dirty funders.
An early example of video erotica from the Videofreex. A group of naked people lounge around smoking and listening to music. A male and female couple is making love on the floor in a room full of monitors.
Set in the industrial suburbs of Beirut, Majnounak (Crazy of You) explores male sexuality through interviews with three men who are asked to recount very openly the beginning, middle, and end of a sexual relationship they have experienced. The video explores the image they wanted to project of themselves, hence the image of the "male" they identify with. Their stories are alike, starting with seduction and ending after sex.
An homage to the death of the soap opera, The Evil Eyes is a 1960's era story of a grandmother faced with her mortality, a mother in mid-life crisis, and a son realizing his sexuality - a dysfunctional family whose unspoken angst manifests in the latest episode of their beloved supernatural soap opera, Before Dawn.
A fable-like tale, Splash explores the interplay between identity, fantasy, and homosexual desire in pre-adolescence within the narrow confines of black masculinity. The tape is an exploration of the filmmaker’s psycho-social and sexual development within a society that encourages the consumption of whiteness and heterosexuality. Splash reveals how the family becomes the agency through which sexual repression and gender conformity are carried out.
Made for Madrid Pride 2017, Wonders Wander is a location based mobi-web-serial with four fictional episodes set in Madrid.
In this interview Cecilia Dougherty describes her work and her explorations into family interactions, outsider psychology, role-playing, lesbian sexuality, and popular culture. Her videos Grapefruit (1989) and Coal Miner’s Granddaughter (1991) work from within mass culture norms to create a lesbian dialogue within the “normal”—what Dougherty calls “the life of the ordinary lesbian and her working-class family.” Her more recent vides explore lesbian identity within a separate social sphere.
A soft-focus close-up of mouth and lips is set to the sounds of lovemaking. A soft-porn video on how easy it is to get porn.
This title is also available on Ximena Cuevas: El Mundo del Silencio (The Silent World) and Half-Lies: The Videoworks of Ximena Cuevas.
Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (English Version) is an experimental documentary about "The Western Hostage Crisis." The crisis refers to the abduction and detention of Westerners like Terry Anderson, and Terry Waite in Lebanon in the 80s and early 90s by "Islamic militants." This episode directly and indirectly consumed Lebanese, U.S., French, and British political and public life, and precipitated a number of high-profile political scandals like the Iran-Contra affair in the U.S.
