curate:

Zanele has started an Indiegogo campaign to raise funds to replace her equipment – PLEASE watch the video and donate what you can

I”ve lost all the work I produced from 2008 – 2012. Also backups were stolen.
I thought of the day I spoke with another friend about alternative storage. Now it is too late.
I feel like a breathing zombie right now.
I don’t even know where to start. I’m wasted.
I’ve sent out a note to friends to tell them about the incident.

The person/s got access to the flat via the toilet window, broke the burglar guard and got away with my cameras, lenses, memory cards and external hard drives, laptop, cellphones…
Whoever ransacked the place got away with more than 20 external hard drives with the most valuable content I’ve ever produced

I am hoping that a few of my good friends are willing to go to pawn shops or to other places where this type of equipment is sold. I do not even want to know who the thief is.

Campaign to replace Zanele Muholi’s stolen photography equipment

On the 28th April, Zanele returned home from Seoul, South Korea to discover that all her work between 2008 and 2012 stored on 20 hard drives and including backups had been stolen on the 20th. The thieves also stole her cameras, lens, memory sticks and laptops. There are no words to describe Zanele’s feelings at this time as an entire original archive of Black queer lesbian history has been destroyed and that impacts on all of us – makes invisible what Zanele has worked so hard to make visible and speak of through her photography. via blacklooks

(via derica)

(via An Interview With Hiromi Tango | Brisbane | The Thousands)

Japanese-born, now Sydney- (but ex-Brisbane) based artist Hiromi Tango is building something I like to refer to as ‘the womb room’ – but is really an installation representing the female reproduction organs of flowers – pistils. ..

SW: Can you tell us about collaboration in your work?
HT: Collaboration is a really difficult word – I’m often asked if my process in collaborative, but it’s actually more site and situation responsive, or conversational. I just respond to those elements. For example, a Japanese tourist just came to say hello as an audience member, and now he’s heavily involved in the project – he’s actually the Assistant Director of the project. He’s making a catalogue and taking lots of photographs and taking a big direction with the work. He absolutely influences the way the project looks, but it’s really about conversation and dialogue. If someone is willing to give happily, then I respond and we respond to one another.

SW: A pistil is also the reproductive organ of a female flower, how is the work you’re making relating to nature? The installation seems very chaotic, but very organic as well.
HT: I guess the inspiration comes from the human organs, or biology that I was interested in. I was always interested in identity. Pistil responded to a personal experience where I nearly lost a close friend in Japan – she lost her home, her neighbours, her only possessions and many lives in a split second. I had no choice to make work about nature and the human condition. It’s not really a deliberate process, but I continue accumulating, generating and editing. Someone told me my work was about loss and accumulation, so I guess I’m confronting those issues in Pistil. The work is lots of things that have been wrapped, so it’s about wrapping emotions. The pistil is the brain part of the flower for my artistic direction and also about the rich emotions we carry that are incomplete or imperfect. I think emotions are organic, like nature. Reality is really tough and regardless of difficult issues, there’s always a way to recover, and this is the object of Pistil.

(via Hiromi Tango being interviewed - ABC Radio National ))

Hiromi Tango ‘X chromosome 2012’ Instillation.

From the ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’ QAGOMA exhibition. interview audio here

Mobile Homecoming is an innovative and loving response to a deep craving for intergenerational connection. A craving that lives in the hearts of queer black same gender loving elders and visionaries. A craving that has taken over the minds of two young queer black women. Julia Wallace of Queer Renaissance and Alexis Pauline Gumbs of BrokenBeautiful Press have decided to dedicate the next phase of their lives to collecting and amplifying the social organizing herstories of black women, trans men, and gender queer visionaries who have been refusing the limits of heteronormativity and opening the world up by being themselves in the second half of the 20th century.

via http://www.mobilehomecoming.org/

(via W.A.G.E. | working artists and the greater economy)

so happy belated Labour Day you ppl.

transfeminism:

There are only 3 days left to fund this project!

Pay It No Mind: Marsha P. Johnson

About this project

Dear Friends, Documentary Film Supporters, Activists, and Admirers of Great Courage,

We are in the final post-production stage of an hour-long documentary about the revolutionary trans-activist Marsha P. Johnson. Marsha P. was a seminal figure in the downtown New York City scene from the ‘60s through the ‘90s. Known as “The Saint Of Christopher Street,” Johnson was an instigator at Stonewall, an Andy Warhol model, and a proud, take-no-nonsense drag queen. 

     We are so close to finishing this inspirational film, and interest in it has been such that we were invited to screen the rough cut version at New York’s IFC Theatre. We want to share this documentary with you, but we need just a little help with some finishing funds to help us pay for archival video clips, historical photographs, a sound mix, videotape stock, digital transfers, and a few film festival application fees (programmers are already interested in the film).  

     Antony, founder of the musical group Antony and the Johnsons has generously donated his music and contribution gifts to make this documentary a reality. (And for those of you that didn’t already know, Antony originally named his band in honor of the documentary’s subject, Marsha P. Johnson.)  

     This historic documentary includes interviews with performer Agosto Machado, author Michael Musto, performer/director Jimmy Camicia, Warhol superstar and poet Taylor Mead, and the Stonewall Uprising historian David Carter, among many others.

Please help us to tell this vital, entertaining, and moving story. 

Everyone working on this film has donated their labor. We just need a small financial push to get Marsha’s story out to the world, where it rightly belongs.

Thank you for your love.

(via so-treu)

Queercore shows became more than just entertainment — they became places to cruise, to network, to take self-defense lessons. (via Queer to the Core )

Queercore artists oral history/interview at OUT mag. Bruce La Bruce, Kaia Wilson, Vaginal Davis, Tribe 8 etc.

ubleproject:

Featured Interview: Jackie Anderson, 69

From The Untitled Black Lesbian Elder Project documentary, by tonia.m.

tiona.m. is a multi-media artist whose mission is to make the invisible, visible and humanize her subjects. She believes that her work as a filmmaker and visual artist can inspire various communities by affirming their existence in contemporary society and culture. Her last film, black./womyn.: conversations with lesbians of African descent, provides a platform for Black lesbians to speak for themselves and to confront the hyper-sexualized image of the Black lesbian.

Tiona continues to develop and create films on progressive topics with the hope of directing a narrative feature-length project in the near future. She is currently in production with her next feature length documentary The Untitled Black Lesbian Elder Project,a short narrative film Bumming Cigarettes, and an experimental short series called Be Alarmed: The Black Americana Epic, which is an magical realism themed take on the Black American experience.

[via  her tumblr in the meantime… + trailers on vimeo ]

fuckyeahfeministartandliterature:

Hello, everyone! I just wanted to let you know that !Women Art Revolution is now on Netflix instant stream. Enjoy!

arrghh we don’t get netflix here! for those that do though…

Barbara Hammer. Double Strength, 1978. Four stages of a lesbian relationship explored in an experimental film starring performance artists Terry Sendgraff and Barbara Hammer on suspended trapezes and ropes. (via Brooklyn Museum: Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art: Feminist Art Base: Barbara Hammer)

Shape & Situate is a zine of posters made by artists and DIY creative folk from within Europe, each poster highlighting the (often hidden) history and lives of radical inspirational women and collectives from Europe, as a way of connecting us with the past and the present through a dynamic cultural (re-)articulation of these women’s lives. 

 via remember who you are: Shape & Situate: Posters Of Inspirational European Women. Issue 3  contributing artists and etsy at link

Marina Abramovic (via Lyssa humana)

(via absolutearts.com)

Renée Cox, The Discreet Charm of the Bougies - Missy At Home (detail), 2008.

possibilitiesof:

Hottentot Venus 2000

Lyle Ashton Harris & Renee Valerie Cox 1995

comment by Cox;

“This reclaiming of the image of the Hottentot Venus is a way of exploring my own psychic identification with the image at the level of spectacle. I am playing with what it means to be an African diasporic artist  producing and selling work in a culture that is by and large narcissistically mired in the debasement and objectification of blackness.  And yet, I see my work less as a didactic critique and more as an interrogation of the ambivalence around the body.” [source]