With Now Wave: Beth B – Glowing silent green is dedicating an extensive exhibition, and retrospective to the US-American artist – including numerous world premieres.

The artist and filmmaker Beth B has been creating transgressive and transformative work for over 40 years. Beth B (born 1955) began her artistic work in the late 1970s in the No Wave scene, a New York underground movement whose name ironically refers to New Wave pop culture. In this context, female musicians and visual artists confronted popular forms with avant-garde anti-art. Throughout her prolific career, B has produced over 30 films within the documentary, experimental, and narrative genres and continues to return to her interdisciplinary works. Collaboration with other artists is an essential aspect of her work, for example in her film portraits of Lydia Lunch and Ida Applebroog.

The programme includes a Women’s Short Film screening, featuring the following films, and with guests Emma Swider and Beth B.

Bread
1918 / 16 mins / U.S. / OV / Ida May Park

Bread is a silent-era title found buried under the frozen ground in 1978 in Dawson City, Canada. A hundred years before #MeToo, Ida May Park, formerly also a theater actress, wrote and directed this socially-conscious drama about a powerful man abusing his status by sexually assaulting, harassing, and exploiting women on the ‘casting couch’.

Semiotics of the Kitchen
1975 / 6.33 mins / U.S. / OV / Martha Rosler

A woman stands in a kitchen surrounded by gadgets, picking up each of them and naming them alphabetically with precise, controlled, angry movements, but she acts out the last few letters with her body alone.

Saute Ma Ville
1968 / 13 mins / Belgium / OV with English subtitles. / Chantal Akerman

A young Chantal Akerman goes berserk in her kitchen and while singing, thrashes it: a choreographed amusing protest against household chores with May ‘68 undertones.

Menses
1974 / 3.15 mins / U.S. / OV / Barbara Hammer

Women act out their own dramas in a red-filtered ritual of mutual bonding. A wry comedy on the ironic aspects of menstruation.

Play Boy
1984 / 9 mins / U.S. / OV / Tessa Hughes-Freeland

An experimental film spliced together from the detritus of early 1980s Times Square porn and pawn shops. Gritty, sensorial, and hypnotic.

The Marinn Company
2022 / 14 mins / U.S. / OV / Emma Swider

A damaged rental sex robot learns to defy her programming against her sadistic patron.

Calm Down
2020 / 2.40 mins / U.S. / OV / Beth B

Lydia Lunch’s scathing and succinct rant about the violence that women face on a daily basis.

Sewing Circle
1992 / 7 mins / U.S. / OV / Richard Kern

Performance artist Kembra Pfahler invited a camera to witness one of her most radical and angry gestures: sewing her vagina shut.

Don’t Light My Fire
2019 / 2.25 mins / U.S. / OV / Otoboke Beaver

Japanese punk rock group Otoboke Beaver is a female quartet from Japan. This video illustrates a song that stems from their penultimate album Itekoma Hits.

For more information on the programme running August 15-25th, visit: https://www.silent-green.net/en/programme/detail/2024/8/15/now-wave-beth-b-glowing

For more information on the Women’s Short Film programme on August 17th, visit: https://www.silent-green.net/en/programme/detail/2024/8/17/womens-short-film-programme-guests-emma-swider-beth-b