Installation View: Barbara Hammer, Vital Signs: Artists and the Body, Museum of Modern Art, 2024-2025

Video Still: Barbara Hammer, Sync Touch, 1981 16mm film transferred to video, color, sound, TRT: 10:07 minutes

We are excited to announce that The Museum of Modern Art has acquired Barbara Hammer’s seminal film, Sync Touch (1981), currently on view as part of the exhibition Vital Signs: Artists and the Body, curated by Lanka Tattersall and Margarita Lizcano Hernandez, on view through February 22, 2025.

A landmark in lesbian and feminist cinema, Sync Touch reimagines the relationship between touch and sight as the foundation of a new cinematic language. Blending personal memory, sexuality, and sensory perception, the film explores the tactile nature of childhood within the adult filmmaker. Hammer paints and collages directly onto 16mm film, her hands weaving through the frame alongside vignettes of the female body, creating a visceral dialogue where touch and vision become inseparable.

An infant touches before she sees yet tactility seems a less important or forgotten sense for the adult. I am a sensate being and experience the world kinesthetically. I feel texture when I see something. In filmmaking my aesthetic is the connection between sight and touch. I think this sensibility comes from touching a body similar to my own, reinforcing my sense of touch. In these film frames Simone Knowlton, my French teacher, ironically undercuts the physicality by seducing with language. – Barbara Hammer