kusama pyjamas
Titled for Yayoi Kusama, who is the cat's pyjamas.
Canadian Trans Multidisciplinary Artist and Muse
More documentation of my performance, A Jaunt through the Forest with Two Spirits, during my time at Fire Island Artist Residency.
New queer fiction by me. Also check out the interview about the piece at the bottom.
Claude Cahun Autoportrait,1929 via Exhibition: ‘Entre Nous: The Art of Claude Cahun’ Art Blart
Claude Cahun Autoportrait 1927
“Claude Cahun (1894-1954) has something approaching cult status in today’s art world. However, her work was almost unknown until the early 1980s, when it was championed by the research of François Leperlier, after which exhibitions at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes (1994) and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1995) brought it to public attention.
Her life and work (both literary and artistic) bespeak an extraordinary libertarian personality who defied sexual, social and ethical conventions in what was an age of avant-garde and moral upheaval. Among her many photographs, it is undoubtedly her self-portraits that have aroused the greatest interest in recent years. Throughout her life, Cahun used her own image to dismantle the clichés surrounding ideas of identity. She reinvented herself through photography, posing for the lens with a keen sense of performance and role-play, dressed as a woman or a man, as a maverick hero, with her hair long or very short, or even with a shaved head. This approach was extended in innovative ways in her photographs of objects and use of photomontages, which asserted the primacy of the imagination and of metamorphosis.
via Exhibition: ‘Entre Nous: The Art of Claude Cahun’ Art Blart)
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 producedI 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)
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.
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.
What Makes an Object Queer? 2011.
As a queer artist whose work usually exists somewhere between abstraction and representation, Jamie Q asks the question What Makes an Object Queer? Is an object queer when it’s not quite one thing or another? Can art that does not explicitly address queer topics reflect the identity of its maker in other ways? Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, this limited-edition silkscreened book proposes some criteria for queer objects, accompanied by illustrations reminiscent of Jamie Q’s sculptural work. via Jamie Q
African Women Filmmakers Tell Their Stories
Documentary filmmaking holds a special place in the history of African women’s cinema. In 1972, Senegalese filmmaker Safi Faye became the first sub-Saharan African woman to make a commercially distributed feature film when she directed “Kaddu Beykat”. The film, a mixture of fiction and documentary, depicts the economic problems suffered by Senegalese village farmers because of agriculture policies that Faye says rely on an outdated, colonial system of groundnut monoculture. Faye would go on to direct several documentaries often focused on rural life in her native Senegal.
African women who have taken documentary filmmaking to new levels come from across the continent and handle a wide range of topics. The films show an Africa that is not often seen, according to Beti Ellerson, director of the Center for the Study and Research of African Women in Cinema. Ellerson, who teaches courses in African studies, visual culture and women studies in the Washington, DC, area, is also the producer of a 2002 documentary, “Sisters of the Screen: African Women in the Cinema.”
Much has changed since Faye’s early Senegalese films. The emergence of the Internet, social media and crowd-funding platforms such as Kickstarter now offer a new generation of African women documentary filmmakers the tools to realize their visions. To learn of the challenges and opportunities facing African women filmmakers, AllAfrica’s Genet Lakew and Rahwa Meharena asked three women - Salem Mekuria, Rahel Zegeye and Sosena Solomon (pictured above) - to share their stories. They represent two generations of Ethiopian documentary filmmaking.
related: it feels like docos, esp. queer, WOC and QPOC produced docos, are on fire now. Despite the internet censorship agendas going on, it seems like every week there’s more happening with queer creatives adapting this medium to their message and distributing online.
(Source: , via adammuo)
(via Audre Lorde - The Berlin Years)
Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 focuses on Audre Lorde’s relation to the German Black Diaspora, her literary as well as political influence, and is a unique visual document about the times the author spent in Germany. The film is also for coming generations a valuable historical document of German history, which tells about the development of an Afro-German movement and the origins of the anti-racist movement before and after the German reunification. The film relates the beginnings of these political debates and therefore facilitates a historical analysis and an understanding of present debates on identity and racism in Germany. For the first time, Dagmar Schultz’s archival video- and audio recordings and footage will be made available to a wide public. The film represents an important addition to the documentary “A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde“ by Ada Gray Griffin and Michelle Parkerson which was screened at the 45th Berlin Film Festival in 1995.
Glitter Tongue is an online collection of love poems by thirty queer and trans poets, launching Valentines Day 2012. It grew out of a collective writing effort among Margaret Rhee, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Tamiko Beyer, Oliver Bendorf, Meg Day, and Ching-In Chen, and then expanded to community. This is the result. We invite you to read on for poetic introductions and then explore the poems collected here.
(Source: bravenewgirls, via etiquette-etc)
For her senior project in visual communications at the Holon Institute of Technology (HIT), artist Sivan Hurvitz exhibited a series of illustrations called “Turn right at the end: the future of a country that gave up on democracy.”
In her strikingly realistic, detailed illustrations - six in all – Sivan imagines “an apocalyptic, harshly exaggerated, imaginary, future scenario” in an Israel that is no longer a democracy. Her purpose, she writes, is “to provoke and raise questions among Israelis about the direction the country is going in and to think if this is the country we want to become in the future.” She notes that, while the scenarios are purposely exaggerated, each illustration was inspired by a real-life event that is described in the caption.
Pride and Prejudice, by Sivan Hurvitz
Inspiration: In May 2010 a member of Be’er Sheva’s city council, Zachariya Ohev Shalom, attacked the municipal decision to sponsor a pride parade in the city of Be’er Sheva. He stated: “I don’t hate the gay-lesbian community in Be’er Sheva, they are simply sick and in need of treatment.”
Notes (LG): The building looks like a typical Israeli national health clinic, but it is called the National Institute for the Treatment of Sexual Deviations.” The slogan over the poster on the right, showing the heterosexual couple, is “I’m cured!”
Katlego Mashiloane and Nosipho Lavuta, Ext. 2, Lakeside, Johannesburg 2007
From the Being exhibition, 2007 Zanele Muholi. Artist statement:
Being is an exploration of both our existence and our resistance as lesbians/women loving women, as black women living our intersecting identities in a country that claims equality for all within the LGBTI community, and beyond. The work is aimed at erasing the very stigmatisation of our sexualities as ‘unAfrican’, even as our very existence disrupts dominant (hetero)sexualities, patriarchies and oppressions that were not of our own making.
Since slavery and colonialism, images of us African women have been used to reproduce heterosexuality and white patriarchy, and these systems of power have so organised our everyday lives that it is difficult to visualise ourselves as we actually are in our respective communities. Moreover, the images we see rely on binaries that were long prescribed for us (hetero/homo, male/female, African/unAfrican). From birth on, we are taught to internalise their existences, sometimes forgetting that if bodies are connected, connecting, the sensuousness goes beyond simplistic understandings of gender and sexuality.
Despite the fact that, in contrast to most other African states, our South African Bill of Rights guarantees us legal protections against homophobia, there are still no loving, intimate photographs of black lesbians. As a visual artist, one is always confronted with the politics of representation. I have the choice to portray my community in a manner that will turn us once again into a commodity to be consumed by the outside world, or to create a body of meaning that is welcomed by us as a community of queer black women.
I choose the latter path, because it is through capturing the visual pleasures and erotica of my community that our being comes into focus, into community and national consciousness. And it is through seeing ourselves as we find love, laughter, joy that we can sustain our strength and regain our sanity as we move into a future that is sadly still filled with the threat of insecurities - HIV/AIDS, hate crimes, violence against women, poverty, unemployment.
In the past year, I have lost two of my friends to AIDS-related illnesses (one in April 2006 and the other in March 2007). Both of these women made herstory within the lesbian community, but because of resource politics, their stories are not publicly celebrated.
Consequently, an aspect of these images is to create awareness around how we as lesbians need to take precautions when we engage sexually with other women. Researchers routinely perpetuate the wrong notion that we are less at risk for infection and transmission because we do not sleep with men. But the reality is that our fellow sistahs are raped and killed in this country every day. I wanted to capture photographs of ‘my people’ before we are no more. Being is part of an ongoing journey to interrogate the construction of our sexualities and selves, and then to deconstruct ourselves, identity by painfully-earned identity, in order to see the parts that make up our whole.
Whole exhibition at linked gallery, some NSFW.
