David Wojnarowicz with Jesse Hultberg, Beautiful People, 1987, 27’56’’
Maria Galindo (Mujeres Creando), La Puta, 2001, 12’55’’
Lynda Benglis, Female Sensibility, 1973, 13’
15 September 2024, 4 pm – 10.30 pm, cinema hall
video loop
#Sonata #Supplement
David Wojnarowicz with Jesse Hultberg, Beautiful People, 1987, 27’56’’
Maria Galindo (Mujeres Creando), La Puta, 2001, 12’55’’
From the series Mom Didn’t Tell Me (12 episodes on the theme of sexuality: a lifelong prostitute, a civil servant with two children, a nun and a domestic worker act as teachers of sexuality. In an ambivalent relationship with the audience, each of them gives a series of pointers on what is love, pleasure, men, what is clean and what is dirty, what is proper and what is immoral. All in a teacherly tone and in direct dialogue with the audience. At the same time, they recall the experiences that made them unhappy, reconstructing the stories of their lives over the course of the 12 chapters). La Puta, starring Chilean Eliana Dentone, then executive secretary of the sex workers, is a short film directed by Maria Galindo and produced by Mujeres Creando. It is a nighttime version of the original daytime action that was interrupted by the police and for which an obscenity lawsuit was filed by the state against Mujeres Creando. The collective won the lawsuit, which allowed the short film to be reshot. La Puta has been broadcast on public television and presented at hundreds of international art events.
Lynda Benglis, Female Sensibility, 1973, 13’
Two women, faces framed in tight focus, kiss and caress. Their interaction is silent, muted by Benglis’ superimposition of a noisy, distracting soundtrack of appropriated AM radio: bawdy wisecracks of talk-show hosts and male callers, interacting in the gruff terms of normative masculinity; male country-western singers plying women with complaints about bad love and bad coffee; a man preaching on the creation of Adam and Eve. The tape’s challenge may, in part, direct itself at the viewer. While one might find it easy to dismiss the gender clichés of the soundtrack, it may be harder to resolve the hermetically-sealed indifference and disconcerting ambiguity (lovers? performers?) of the two women. By turns conscious of the camera and seemingly oblivious to it, their dreamy indifference is a rebuke to the disruptive chatter hovering around them, and perhaps also to the expectations of those who watch.
DAVID WOJNAROWICZ was born in Red Bank, New Jersey in 1954. For most of his life and career, he lived and worked in New York City. He channeled a vast accumulation of raw images, sounds, memories, and lived experiences into a powerful voice that was an indelible presence in the New York City downtown art scene of the 1970s and ’80s. Through writing, film, painting, drawing, photography, mixed-media installations, and performance, Wojnarowicz affirmed art’s vivifying power in a society he viewed as alienating and corrosive, especially for those who were not part of the “pre-invented existence” of the mainstream. Using blunt symbology and graphic illustrations, he exposed what he felt this mainstream repressed: poverty, abuses of power, blind nationalism, greed, gay sex, and the devastation of the AIDS epidemic. His nihilism, however, was also infused with his celebration and empathetic documentation of the alternative histories that he witnessed and lived.
Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
MARÍA GALINDO NEDER (Bolivia, 1964) is a psychologist, militant activist of radical feminism, writer and communicator, co-founder and leader of the anarcho-feminist collective Mujeres Creando, a landmark feminist struggle born in 1992 in Bolivia and present throughout Latin America. In her social activism she has given voice to discriminated groups and criticized and highlighted patriarchal behavior. She has published several books, articles and essays in academic and independent media in various countries around the world. She has also presented shows and film productions such as Serie Acciones (2002), Exiliadas del Neoliberalismo (2004) and 13 Horas de Rebelión (2013). She has exhibited her work at the São Paulo Biennial, Museo Nacional Reina Sofía in Madrid, Documenta14 in Kassel and Athens, Casa de las Culturas del Mundo in Berlin, Centro Cultural Metropolitano in Quito, and Centre Pompidou in Paris. Her latest publication Feminismo Bastardo (Mujeres Creando, 2021) is a critique that addresses utopias, feminist, patriarchal, social and cultural conceptions.
LYNDA BENGLIS was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana in 1941. She received a B.F.A. from Newcomb College. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the 39th Venice Biennale; Cheim & Read and Franklin Parrasch galleries in New York, among many other venues. In 2009, a retrospective of her work was exhibited at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands, which then traveled to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; on to Le Consortium, Dijon, France and the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island in 2010, and finally to the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York in 2011. She has been awarded two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and an Australian Council for the Arts Award. She has taught at the School of Visual Arts, the University of Arizona, Yale University, Princeton University and the California Institute of the Arts, among other schools.
Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
Free admission untill capacity is reached
Via Nizza 138
Media partner: Zero