WOMEN I LOVE

May 3 – May 16, 2021
open daily:  noon – 6 pm
Franz Josefs Kai 3, A-1010 Vienna

Contact: fiona.liewehr@chello.at
+43 680 50 62 133

Curator: Fiona Liewehr
Exhibition design & graphics: Toledo i Dertschei

Barbara Jean Hammer (*1939 in Hollywood, Los Angeles † 2019 in Manhattan, New York City) is considered a pioneer of queer and feminist cinema and was one of the first filmmakers explicitly dedicated to making lesbian realities visible. In experimental as well as documentary films, photographs, drawings, collages and performances, the artist dealt with the breaking up of prevailing gender roles, lesbian identity and sexuality. Hammer’s work illuminated taboo subjects such as aging, illness, and death. The artist confronted challenges to personal and political identities and deconstructed narratives and structures that repress images of women. She formally pushed the medium of film to its limits in the spirit of the Expanded Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, seeking a fusion of film, painting, sound, and text in optically printed films and the direct involvement of the audience in performances.

With experimental films such as Sisters! (1973), Dyketactics (1974), Multiple Orgasms (1976), Sappho (1978), and Double Strength (1978), she established a queer feminist cinema at a time when the subject matter had largely been left to the pornographic imagination of male artists and filmmakers. Traveling throughout the United States, Africa, and Europe, she collected ideas of women and homosexual experiences through photographs and films. The mostly black and white photographs show shared moments on film sets, private and public situations, and interpersonal atmospheres of friends. Hammer’s photographic gaze is never voyeuristic but conveys a self-determined, tender closeness that reinforces the protagonists’ intimate naturalness.

In her feature-length documentaries Nitrate Kisses (1992), Tender Fictions (1995) and History Lessons (2000), Barbara Hammer posed questions about the cultural and socio-political historical construction of queerness and its community. She processed autobiographical aging and health issues, such as her diagnosis of ovarian cancer, in A Horse is not a Methaphor (2008). By approaching fundamental feelings such as love and death and trying to involve her audience directly, she also wanted to motivate them to think and act critically and socio-politically.

This retrospective exhibition, the first of its kind in Austria, focuses on the content and significance of her visual interweaving of films, photographs, drawings, collages and performances. The exhibition develops an image of Hammer as a committed activist for the equality of all genders and an advocate for human rights. In films, photographs as well as interviews, the exhibition combines autobiographical material and artistic work that is groundbreaking for many contemporary artists.

Women I love is produced in collaboration and with the help of the estate of Barbara Hammer and her widow, human rights lawyer Florrie R. Burke.