Kathy Rae Huffman Archive screening
12 July 2016 6.30 – 9.30pm
This summer a selection of archive materials from curator Kathy Rae Huffman’s collection of rare books and catalogues held at Goldsmiths Library will be coming to Res. This screening includes work commissioned and curated by Kathy Rae Huffman with a focus upon the ritualised unfolding of the body in the ‘Bio Tech Century’.
6.30pm: Body Scan, Eva Wohlgemuth, 1997-2003, 7’00”
“In February (1997) I went to Monterrey, California, in order to map my body. The recorded x, y and z coordinates of 285,000 points on my body resulted in a ‹Bodyscan› that describes the surface of the body. From this point onward, I exist as a digital data-object, also in the Internet. Many current body-related works deal with the descriptions and generating of imaginary cyber-bodies, and functionally-improved body-machines. In my case, I try to examine the influences and parameters, which determine the body, and see it first of all as a three-dimensional, topographical structure[…] Here the inner space of the body’s covering opens itself as the carrier of real image material, in which I portray diverse, given aspects of myself. My art-body possesses ‹depth› and thereby examines that which is called ‹interiority› and defines the integrity of the subject.”
– Eva Wohlgemuth
6: 40pm: Sex and Gender in the Bio Tech Century, subRosa, 2002, 5’16”
Documentation of a workshop animating cyberfeminist collective subRosa’s Sex and Gender Workbook, contained within the Kathy Rae Huffman archive. “Participants are divided into 5 groups and registered as students. “T.A.G” and “C” represent the four bases of DNA. Members of the fifth group “D” contain undesirable “junk” DNA and are unfit for reproduction” – subRosa
“Which depictions of female genitals are not pornographic? A documentary video about the aesthetics of female genital surgery, reconstruction of both labia minora and majora – and the reasons why women decide to alter their genitals. While the commonly held opinion is that especially elderly women decide to either reduce or lift their labia in order to feel better about their appearance, the video presents the case of a woman who decides to enlarge her labia minora because she, on the contrary, believes that this procedure will make her feel more feminine. Vulva De/Re constructa successfully deconstructs the sales language and Freudian imagery used in the growing field of cosmetic labial surgery.” – Anna Ehrlemark
7 – 7.30pm Break
7.30pm- 9pm: Fresh Kill, Shu Lea Cheang, 1994, 1h18’41”
“Fresh Kill’s title refers to a fictitious landfill that dominates Staten Island. Junk rules many of the film’s compositions, and, thematically, the film revolves around the detritus of an urban consumer society in which transnational corporations bring raw materials from the Third World, contaminating goods and people in the process, and dump them in the borough. Fresh Kill makes sense out of this refuse by exploring connections among people on the edges of corporate capitalism and off-center in a white, bourgeois, heterosexual world. From the beaches of Taiwan’s Orchid Island, used as a nuclear waste site in the 1980s, to the shores of New York’s Staten Island, Fresh Kill collapses the globe in solidarity against racism, sexism, and the excesses of transnational corporate capitalism as resistance circulates through networks originally designed to facilitate the exchange of labor, commodities, and capital.” – Gina Marchetti for Video Data Bank
Supported by Goldsmiths Library, Goldsmiths Research and Enterprise Committee and The Annual Fund.