Feminist filmmaker and pioneer of queer cinema, Barbara Hammer made over 90 moving image works as well as performances, installations, photographs, collages and drawings.

May 15, 1939 – March 16, 2019


June 22, 2024 - January 26, 2025

The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia

Evidentiary Bodies Installation on View at The Fralin Museum of Art

Evidentiary Bodies is Hammer's first and only multichannel video installation. The immersive work intertwines images from Hammer’s previous films with her own medical diagnostic imagery creating a powerful and moving representation of her life, work, and experience with cancer.

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5 September - 10 November

Batalha Centro de Cinema

Beneath the Surface: The Swimming Pool in Cinema

Presenting a selection of works from the 1930s to the present day and spanning various genres and aesthetics, Batalha Centro de Cinema's program shows how swimming pools are used in cinema, becoming vehicles for reflections on body, desire, death, community, class and ecologies.

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September 14 - November 30, 2024

Webber Gallery

Webber Gallery Presents “A Forest Fire between Us”

Image from Women I Love - film by Barbara Hammer
Webber 939 is delighted to present A forest fire between us, an exhibition of works by West Coast based photographer, lesbian sex activist, and educator Tee A. Corinne, and including a projection of Barbara Hammer's "Women I Love."

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Opening September 19th, 7:00pm. On view through February 2, 2025.

MUDAM: The Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg

MUDAM Presents “Radical Software”

Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 surveys the history of digital art from a feminist perspective, focusing on women who worked with computers as a tool or subject and artists who worked in an inherently computational way.

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October 9, 2024 - January 9, 2025

1 Woburn Walk, WC1H OJJ

Barbara Hammer at Champ Lacombe, London’s inaugural exhibition at 1 Woburn Walk

Champ Lacombe will be opening their London gallery with an exhibition of works by Barbara Hammer.

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Nov 3, 2024–Feb 22, 2025

MoMA

MoMA Presents Vital Signs: Artists and the Body

Vital Signs includes over 100 works by artists who question what it means to be an individual within a larger society—and how socially sustained categories such as gender, race, and sexual identity are rooted in abstraction.

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October 23, 2024, 7pm

Museo Macro

Museo Macro Presents 16MM RUN

Image from No No Nooky TV - a film by Barbara Hammer
The Rome Museum of Contemporary Art presents 16MM RUN, a presentation of three films on 16mm concerning the representation of women and sexuality.

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In the early 1970s Hammer studied film at San Francisco State University. After seeing Maya Deren’s film Meshes of the Afternoon, she was inspired to make experimental films about her personal life. After coming out as a lesbian she “took off on a motorcycle with a super-8 camera” and in 1974 filmed Dyketactics, widely considered to be one of the first lesbian films.

Hammer sought to deconstruct and disempower the narratives and structures that oppress women in general and lesbians in particular. From her earliest experimental work, her films are playfully and relentlessly challenging of accepted norms and taboos.

In 1992 Hammer released her first feature film, Nitrate Kisses—an experimental documentary exploring the the repression and marginalization of LGBT people since the First World War.

Hammer continued making specifically history-based films for a number of years, including Tender Fictions, History Lessons, My Babushka: Searching Ukrainian Identities, Resisting Paradise and Lover/Other—exploring issues important to her own identity and to those of other artists and lesbians.

When Hammer was diagnosed with stage III ovarian cancer in 2006, she began exploring life lived with cancer in her films and performances. Her award-winning 2009 film, A Horse Is Not A Metaphor, is a celebration of her love of life despite the difficulties

In her memoir, HAMMER! Making Movies out of Sex and Life (The Feminist Press, 2010), Hammer shares stories of her rich and colorful life, the development of her feminist thinking and the joys of working against the grain.

In the last decade of her life, Hammer was given retrospective exhibitions in several internationally major museums and in 2017 her paper archive was acquired by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Hammer also established the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant—awarding the first grant in 2017.

In the two and a half years before she died, Hammer’s artistic output was remarkable. She premiered her major performance and multi-
disciplinary work Evidentiary Bodies at Microscope Gallery, participated in the Lynne Sachs’ film Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor, and gave a performative lecture at the Whitney Museum on The Art of Dying.

In late 2018, after over 100 rounds of chemotherapy and tumors taking over her lungs, Hammer finally ceased undergoing interventions to counteract the cancer and spent her final months at home with her beloved partner Florrie Burke and with visits from many, many friends. Activist to the very end, Hammer used her dying to advance the cause of the right to medical aid in dying.