On the occasion of the 2020 Gallery Weekend Berlin, KOW is honored to showcase a selection from the wide-ranging oeuvre of Barbara Hammer (1939–2019), an American pioneer of experimental film, feminist art, and queer cinema.

We present films from the 1980s that, to this day, have mostly been screened at arthouse theaters and festivals. From the earliest days of her career, in 1968, Hammer located her work in the art world, but, at that time, film and video were media that were rarely included in exhibitions, and lesbian and queer voices like Hammer’s were struggling to be heard in public spaces. Only now, after exhibitions mounted by prominent collections and institutions, is her art finally gaining traction in the cultural consciousness of wider audiences.

Barbara Hammer framed deviant perspectives on social relations, on the female body, and on the people who mattered to her, devising an alternative to the male gaze that long ruled, and still remains hegemonic in the worlds of art and cinema. She turned her attention to images and stories from lives—her own and those of other women and men—that were suppressed by the modern apparatuses of the camera and the editing suite, sound and technical abstraction, but also by politics and the medical and media industries; images and stories that were time and again edited out of the common psyche and not even taken into consideration. Hammer put her hand to the task, earnestly and joyfully. She grappled with herself, with her media, with situations that were challenging, with a canon that included some and excluded others, with the aesthetics of her time. And her time spanned half a century.

Focusing on the 1980s—when Hammer left California for New York—our exhibition turns the spotlight on an artist confidently pursuing an experimental practice and expanding on the themes of her early work, while insistently enlarging the radius of her activities and her engagement with politics and media.