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

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)

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 ]

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)

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]

ahitinsweden:

Felix Gonzalez-Torres “Untitled” (Placebo), 1991

“Untitled” (Placebo) from1991, consisted of 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of silver-foil wrapped candies originally laid out across the floor of the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York. Placebos are used in clinical trails; they are sugar pills that essentially have no effect on the body. Those who visit the gallery are invited to take a piece of candy; viewers are taking part in a clinical trail of Gonzalez-Torres’ creating. Individuals who participate in actual clinical trials do not know weather they are getting the real pills or the placebo. So too visitors to the gallery are partaking in something not completely known to them, they must put their trust in Gonzalez-Torres. Regardless, these pills, or candy, real or inert, become part of your body in a highly intimate way, for a time, actually becoming part of you. These individuals allow something into their body without fully understanding the implications, a sign of the desperation that griped so many during the AIDS crisis.

(via sexartandpolitics)

William Yang has documented the gay scene in Sydney since the 1970s. At this time many were celebrating new-found freedom, greater acceptance in society and the start of the Mardi Gras parades. In these images from the 1990s Yang investigates the impact of AIDS on his friends and community, as well as the broader social implications of the disease. The works act as memorials which acknowledge both individual fears, the illnesses that AIDS and HIV bring, the repercussions on the gay community, and the importance of public displays of recognition and remembrance.

Darrin and Linden (part 3), (1991, printed circa 1992) by William Yang

Text reads: “They showed me a Herb Ritts photo that they liked. The two men in it were in a stylised pose and they were naked. Could I do for them something like that? I explained I couldn’t reproduce the pace as that would be too difficult, moreover it was imitation, but I got the idea of what they wanted. They wanted sexy shots, but they wanted them artistic, definitely nothing pornographic. You see, they were madly in love.”

(via William Yang: Life Lines- Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art)

William Yang - William in scholar’s costume, 1984

text on photo reads: I learned Taoism, a Chinese philosophy, and this led me to embracing my Chinese heritage which hitherto had been denied and unacknowledged. People at the time called me Born Again Chinese, and that’s not a bad description, as there was a certain zealousness to the process. But now, I see it as a liberation from racial suppression, and prefer to say that I came out as Chinese.

(via William Yang – The Art of Seduction | Iris Prize Short List 2011)

William Yang, The Art of Seduction Doco. 2010. Dir. Craig Boreham  [image ‘Alpha’ by by William Yang, Brisbane late 60’s]

William Yang is a third-generation Australian-Chinese artist whose work examines his Chinese family history and gay identity. This documentary looks at one aspect of William’s work as a photographer - male nudes - the most personal and vulnerable of his work because it always involves a negotiation or transaction.