Barbara Hammer:Boundless
Jan 16-18, 2019 Indianan University Cinema presented what was to become the final retrospective of experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer’s work. Hammer died March 16 and the series was picked up by the National Gallery of Art and re-presented, along with a symposium featuring curators Carmel Curtis and Joan Hawkins, in September 2019. This paper explores both Hammer’s work and the challenges of curating the work of any political artist whose career spans so many years and movements.
Filmmaker and artist Barbara Hammer began her artistic career in the late 1960s, with films that explore lesbian subjectivity and sexuality, politics and representation, and visceral manifestations of pleasure and discomfort. Often using the camera as an extension of her body to see, touch, and explore, Hammer’s oeuvre is evidence of a textured approach to film and video-making --simultaneously rooted in experimentations with the medium as well as experimentations with representations of oneself. Positioning herself in front of and behind the camera, Hammer uses the process of media making as a way to create and cultivate alternative spaces in cinema not positioned in patriarchal, Hollywood conventions or patriarchal hetero-normative avant-garde traditions.
Barbara Hammer: Boundlessexplores five decades of Hammer’s work—highlighting themes of desire, feminist community, health and wellness, historical and archival research, and self-representation. These threads consistent throughout Hammer’s work point to a pioneering filmography of queer experimentation. The paper focuses on Hammer herself, but also on the process of curation.