Program
“Create change: an evening with Barbara Hammer”
Grokhovsky presented the acclaimed filmmaker Barbara Hammer who screened two films and then engaged in a lively Q&A with Kate Kraczon,? Associate Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art / University of Pennsylvania.
Barbara Hammer: Diving Women of Jeju-do, 2007, 30 mins
Jeju-do is the largest of Korean islands and lies between Korea and Japan. There, for hundreds of years, women dive without breathing apparatus to the ocean floor and collect shellfish, octopus, and urchins that they sell. This ancient woman’s tradition is about to die. Filmmaker Barbara Hammer dives with the women and records the reasons behind their disappearing work and lifestyles.
Barbara Hammer: Maya Deren’s Sink, 2011, 30 mins
Maya Deren’s Sink explores Deren’s concepts of space, time and form through visits and projections filmed in her LA and NY homes. Light projections in Deren’s intimate space evoke a former time and space providing entree into the homes of an influential filmmaker we will never know. The film reclaims the spaces that inspired her work in order to share it with audiences. Time and space are collapsed as film locations of the 40’s are re-imagined in the present.
Performances by an actor based on Deren’s film and writing as well as overlooked biographical insights reveal a creative personality untouched by convention. Voices from the past speaking from doorways, windows and picture frames include the current L.A. and N.Y.C. home owners, Teiji Ito’s second wife, Judith Malvina, Carolee Schneemann, Ross Lipmann and others. Through collapsing time and extending space, a unique architectural portrait of the artist is created. The experimental soundtrack is compiled and augmented by the music of Teiji Ito (Maya’s third husband) and Tavia Ito, Teiji’s daughter.
Q & A Video Documentation
Bios
Barbara Hammer is a visual artist primarily working in film and video. Her work reveals and celebrates marginalized peoples whose stories have not been told. Her cinema is multi-leveled and engages an audience viscerally and intellectually with the goal of activating them to make social change. She has been honored with 4 retrospectives in the last 3 years: The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Tate Modern in London, Jeu de Paume in Paris, and the Toronto International Film Festival. She is most well known for making the first explicit lesbian film in 1974, Dyketactics, and for her trilogy of documentary film essays on queer history Nitrate Kisses (1992), Tender Fictions (1995), History Lessons, (2000). Her recent films, A Horse Is Not A Metaphor (2009), Generations (2010) and Maya Deren’s Sink (2011) were awarded Teddy Awards for Best Short Film at the Berlin International Film Festivals. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (201314) to make a film on Elizabeth Bishop.
Kate Kraczon joined ICA in 2008 from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. She is currently organizing the first museum exhibition of the work of Becky Suss, and an independent project with Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere in conjunction with the Wagner Free Institute of Science. She recently worked with Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme on the first North American presentation of their project The Incidental Insurgents (2012–present) at ICA (2015), and commissioned the major video installation Easternsports (2014) by Alex Da Corte and Jayson Musson. In 2014 she oversaw the museum’s fiftieth anniversary exhibition, ICA@50, which included projects she commissioned by Elisabeth Subrin and Linda Yun, as well as Mary Ellen Carroll, Simon Kim, and Bryan Zanisnik with the Philadelphia non-profit RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residency) and their co-founder, artist William Dufala. Previous exhibitions include Karla Black’s first major museum exhibition in the United States (2013); First Among Equals (2012, co-curated with Alex Klein); One is the loneliest number (2011); Summer Studio with Anthony Campuzano (2010); Touch Sensitive: Anthony Campuzano (2009); and Asking Not Telling (2009). She has overseen ICA’s annual juried video exhibition, Open Video Call, since 2008. Kraczon was the receiving curator for the traveling exhibitions Dear Nemesis, Nicole Eisenman 1993–2013 (2014), Readykeulous by Ridykeulous: This is What Liberation Feels LikeTM (2014), Jeremy Deller: Joy in People (2012), and Tim Rollins and K.O.S.: A History (2009).
