Agenda

Barbara Hammer (b. 1939) is an American feminist artist known as a pioneer in experimental film. Throughout the 1970s, filmmaker Barbara Hammer toured the United States, Africa, and Europe, making film after film about women and the lesbian experience, neither of which had seldom been seen by a woman, for women on screen before. During this prolific period, Hammer photographed her travels, her lovers, moments of community and kinship between her collaborators on set, private and public performances, friends, strangers. In these photographs, most of which have never been exhibited before, Hammer’s work explodes traditional notions of female sexuality by showing it for what it is: complex, messy, abstract, human. Notions of perfection and imperfection (and, in a related subject, youth and age) are taken up and challenged throughout the photographs exhibited as Hammer considers the many types of bodies and individuals who compose lesbian life.