Anastasia Klose has established a reputation for her ‘aesthetic of the pathetic’, drawing on the painful or humorous moments in her life to make videos. … Klose made Film for my Nanna 2006 in response to a question from her grandmother about her marriage prospects. A roughly-made sign reading ‘Nanna, I’m still alone’ was a last-minute addition to the bridal outfit but its poignant message gives the work its charge.

via Anastasia Klose ‘Film for my nanna’ 2006 | 21st Century Blog ‘Art in the First Decade’ | Gallery of Modern Art

the full video’s more empathetic to her Nana’s POV, and quietly beautiful, than reviews focused on the joking aspect suggest. it features Klose walking around Melbourne in the wedding dress, sometimes engaging with people, but often alone, incongruous gown emphasizing her solitude.

i really loved it. it’s refreshing to see Klose embody the socially discomforting figure of the man hunting, “still” single woman with self acceptance and generation bridging empathy, rather than desperation or anxiety. which sounds really 2nd wave. which it kind of is.

jeevermadness:

Promotional trailer for Naalu Pennungal (Four Women), a 2007 Malayalam film directed by Adoor Gopalakrishnan, one of Kerala’s most celebrated directors. I saw this at a film festival in DC a few years ago and really need to watch it again.

The trailer doesn’t have subtitles, but the film is made up of four vignettes based on short stories by Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, each of which explores a different type of struggle faced by women living in Kerala’s Alapuzha (Alleppey) district. The final vignette, “The Spinster,” stars Nandita Das as an unmarried woman struggling to find a place within her younger sister’s house. Nandita Das is one of my favorite actresses and I loved this section the most, but the whole film is fantastic.

(via so-treu)

A short 16-millimeter film and the resulting still images called “Mother of All,” in which Sherman spins wool in a moonlit forest, is a meditation on spinsterhood and sexual prowess. In “Untitled Weaving Installation,” Sherman used a traditional loom to weave female relatives’ lingerie and silk stockings into a wall hanging.

Many of Sherman’s artist friends, peers and mentors see her as a feminist artist. “When I was talking with her and I knew she was doing this work with the wigmakers I said, ‘Oh, you’re looking at both ends of the body,’” said Mary Walling Blackburn, a friend, writer and the founder of a residency that Sherman did in Marfa, Texas this summer called The Anhoek School. “‘Why do you keep going to these extremes of the body?’ When I met her it was the shoes [and now] it’s the hair. … So she moves things both towards the sexed and away from the sexed simultaneously.”

Sherman said her work begins with her experience, and most of it is a testament to her own and other women’s. Still, the striking line through in all of it is an obsession and fascination with the pathology of craft, particularly women’s work, what women make and wear, the slough produced by pathetic or transcendent toil. “A lot of my focus ends up going toward craft, especially right now,” Sherman told me in her studio the first time we met. “I’m aware of my own romanticization of a craftsperson as opposed to an artist and how that feels somehow uncomplicated and how problematic it is to be thinking that way.” Folk art — craft — is made by ordinary people in the context of their lives. Sherman’s obsessions are not with art for art’s sake. They are with what is later claimed as art.

via othergroundNY