queer

Isaac Julien: The Attendant (1993)

Posted July 24, 2015 · Add Comment

The plot revolves around sexual fantasies aroused in a middle-aged black male museum guard — or attendant — by a young white male visitor. Much of the action takes place after closing time. As the guard paces the galleries, a huge 19th-century painting titled “Slaves on the West Coast of Africa”, by the French artist François-Auguste Biard, comes to life, its melodramatic scene of a white master bending over a dying black slave transformed into an up-to-date, leather clad sadomasochistic grouping.

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TROPICAL VIDEO ACTIVISM. Transformative Illegalities & Post-Porning Genders

Posted March 3, 2015 · Add Comment

Curated by Fernanda Nogueira

March 7, 2015, 4-9pm, VBKÖ, Vienna

This screening program stems from the urgencies of a collective body, a body formed by fragments, a mutant, which resists any classification, provocative, unsatisfied, which creates new ways of living by acting in the territory of transgression. Tropical Video Activism presents video productions – either registers of actions or more experimental poetics – as signs to make visible, read and spread social transformations, which are in furious excitement in the public sphere in many Southern geographies.

These processes are not happening just in a single territory. We can map the social effervescence, the networks arising and intensifying the emergence and encounter of new transborder communities capable of sharing activist tools and circulating critical information which in the past could only be found in independent, underground and thought marginal networks. Facing the urgency of action and its various potentialities in these different territories, the modern categories such as “originality” or “authenticity” are turned obsolete. In contrast, a broader notion of “network” is strengthen daily in the configuration of a collective battlefield […]

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Shu Lea Cheang: FLUIDØ (2017)

Posted March 3, 2015 · Add Comment

Following the acclaimed cyberpunk movie I.K.U., which premiered at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival and screened worldwide, Shu Lea Cheang is set to direct FLUIDØ in 2015 with Jürgen Brüning Filmproduktion and Berlin-based crew and cast members.

Set in the post-AIDS future of 2060, where the Government is the first to declare the era AIDS FREE, mutated AIDS viruses give birth to ZERO GEN – humans that have genetically evolved in a very unique way. These gender fluid ZERO GENs are the bio-drug carriers whose white fluid is the hypernarcotic for the 21st century, taking over the markets of the 20th century white powder high. The ejaculate of these beings is intoxicating and the new form of sexual commodity in the future. The new drug, code named DELTA, diffuses through skin contact and creates an addictive high.

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Jai Arun Ravine: Tom/Trans/Thai (2013)

Posted February 5, 2015 · Add Comment

Tom / Trans / Thai is a short experimental film that approaches the silence around female-to-male (FTM) transgender identity in the Thai context by addressing tom and trans-masculine identities in Thai and Thai American communities and the transnational relationships between gender and language.

Interviews conducted with Thai and Thai American toms and trans-masculine people are channeled through the moving body in an effort to locate ourselves in the Thai landscape and create a new language for our kind of being.

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Wu Tsang: Wildness (2012)

Posted December 22, 2014 · Add Comment

Directed by Wu Tsang. Wildness is a portrait of the Silver Platter, a historic, LGBT-friendly bar on the eastside of Los Angeles that has catered to the Latin immigrant community since 1963. With a magical-realist flourish – the bar itself becomes a character in the film – Wildness captures the creativity and conflict that ensue when a group of young, queer artists of colour (Wu Tsang, DJs NGUZUNGUZU and Total Freedom) organise a weekly performance art party, called Wildness, at the bar. What does ‘safe space’ mean, and who needs it? The search for answers to these questions creates coalitions across generations.

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Alianzas tullido transfeministas a traves de la sexualidad y la postpornografía

Posted May 13, 2014 · Add Comment

Presentación y proyección de vídeo a cargo de Pornortopedia y postporno tullido Nexos. Con la participación de Post-Op, Lucrecia Masson y Patricia Carmona.

La idea es contribuir al imaginario pornografico con la visibilización de cuerpos que se salen de los parámetros de normalidad corporal (tullidos, marimachos, trans, gordxs…) y mostrar como deseables las prácticas a las que estas corporalidades invitan.

“No es lo que el postporno puede hacer por la personas con diversidad funcional, sino precisamente estos cuerpos que se mueven y sienten de una manera no mayoritaria lo que pueden hacer por la sexualidad colectiva, ampliando prácticas e imáginarios.”

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Luis F.Bernanza/Margaret Gilpin: Mariposas en el andamio (1996)

Posted April 8, 2014 · Add Comment

by Luis Felipe Bernaza, Margaret Gilpin

After the Revolution, gays were not respected in Cuba, but in the small Havana neighborhood of La Güinera, a few courageous women came to power and encouraged the gay community. Glamorous gowns fashioned from grain sacks and eyelashes made out of carbon paper are the reality of drag in Cuba. In La Güinera, gay transvestite performers have earned respect and status through creative work for the neighbourhood. On stage action and backstage preparation opens out into insightful interviews with community leaders, families, and the performers themselves.

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Kortney R. Ziegler: STILL BLACK – A Portrait of Black Transmen (2009)

Posted April 8, 2014 · Add Comment

STILL BLACK: A Portrait of Black Transmen is brought to life by the stories of six thoughtful, eloquent and diverse transmen. Preachers, teachers, students and activists educate us simply by making their presence known. Each man brings a colorful and complex richness as he describes his relationship to himself, as well as others in his […]

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Pêdra Costa: de_colon_isation (2017->)

Posted December 4, 2013 · Add Comment

de_colon_isation is a live performance series to create a space of intimacy and political claim through the body, live images by a dildo camera and “The Southern Butthole Manifesto”. It uses post-porn as a strategy of pleasure, aesthetics and politics. Playing the artist as an exhibitionist, it shows performance art as a place to interact […]

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Zemirah Moffat: Mirror, Mirror (2009)

Posted October 30, 2013 · Add Comment

Queer Giving is the material realisation of a practice-led research project into contemporary radical queer ways of being. It is one thesis composed of the film Mirror Mirror and the paper One Queer Gift. They are derivatives of my ethnographic investigation into the radical queer vision of London’s Club Wotever (2003-). Working within the potentials of their respective forms, both film and paper argue that radical queer identities, as found in the major urban centres of the metropolitan West, derive their multiple-meanings, integrity and raison d’etre within and through dialogue. Characterised by audio-visual provocation and cautious disclosure, Mirror Mirror reflects this formative feedback through its text and narrative drive.

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Bruce LaBruce: Super 8 1/2 (1993)

Posted September 9, 2013 · Add Comment

LaBruce stars in this vaguely autobiographical look at a triple-X star-director caught in the downward spiral of his career. Remarks Googie, the art-house auteur who’s either exploiting LaBruce or launching his comeback, “He was actually attempting to break down the whole subject-camera relationship… It was as if he was an existentialist trapped in a porno star’s body.” Well, almost.

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Yang Yang: Our Story – 10-year “guerrilla warfare” of Beijing Queer Film Festival (2011)

Posted July 24, 2013 · Add Comment

In 2001 three students of Peking University in Beijing held the first gay and lesbian film festival. The festival was brought to a halt by the university authorities during the opening event. This was a foretaste of what was to follow during the next ten years, in which the festival has battled against the oppressive […]