April showers bring QUEER REPRODUCTION.
A significant body of contemporary feminist work explores questions of adaptation, reiteration, and change through formal, temporal, and aesthetic means. Queer and feminist makers are re-writing the historical narrative while pushing the boundaries of multiple mediums. From Laleen Jayamanne’s A Song of Ceylon, Cecelia Condit’s Oh, Rapunzel, and Midi Onodera’s Ten Cents a Dance, to Elisabeth Subrin’s Shulie, Jennifer Montgomery’s Deliver, Amy Ruhl’s How Mata Hari Lost Her Head and Found Her Body, and Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz’s Salomania, to Ja’tovia Gary’s An Ecstatic Experience, Christina Corfield’s Petticoat Nation, Kate Lain’s friskies paté (for joyce wieland) and Irene Lusztig’s Yours in Sisterhood— these makers masterfully reiterate, reinscribe, and reimagine the past in order to transform the present. Every Monday this month I will post a video exploring this growing body of work that queerly questions the possibilities of re-production in the digital age.
Since her award-winning debut with How Mata Hari Lost Her Head and Found Her Body in 2011, Amy Ruhl has been developing an important body of work that returns persistently to feminist sites/cites in past popular cultures. Ruhl uses the phrase “radical reproduction” to describe this element of her oeuvre which includes a playful research-based practice and deep engagement with feminist film theory. Her ongoing multidisciplinary performance project, Between Tin Men, includes her trademark tropes of authorial self-inscription, mesmerizing visual effects, and feminist camp.
Enjoy!
https://vimeo.com/253139302