Between protest and complicity the protagonists of the program ART KINKS navigate
through structural and institutional pitfalls of the art world. They take a stance, find a
position, create space for themselves, struggle with the confinements and limitations they face
– not only when it comes to art -, search for possibilities of resistance, deviance and humor.
The spaces in which these negotiations take place range from plush living rooms to queer
underground art spaces, the strategies from kinky subversion to artistic self-therapy.
Filmmaker Thirza Cuthand uses a latent gas mask fetish as a jumping off point for looking at her role as a participant in the Whitney Biennial during a contentious year for the museum which had a war profiteer on the board. Faced with calls to withdraw, Cuthand talks about the considerations she had for trying to come up with a way to protest while also being implicated in board member Warren Kander’s artwashing, whose wealth is among other things based on the production of tear gas. Using the gas mask as a potential protest image, she also discusses visiting Chemical Valley, a site in southern Ontario where 40% of Canada’s petrochemical industry lies, and how her visit also left her implicated in artwashing petrochemical money.… >>>
- Director: Thirza Cuthand,Thirza Cuthand
Three characters – the Workshop Leader, the Tracksuit and the Naked Ape - find themselves unexpectedly in a workshop in the middle of Death Valley. They are trying their best to give each other advice, but are mostly limited to repeating what they heard or read from others; often dubious sources. Some of what they talk about and some of what they leave out manifests around them in the form of animals, the undead, exploding cars and holes in the ground. Since none of it is meant to last, they eventually wrap it up with a round of applause and some indispensable evaluation.… >>>
Premiere:
World Premiere
- Director: Ale Bachlechner
Five famous art history portraits come into being as tableaux vivants at a film studio. Supported by a female film team, the director of the film takes on the role of the portrayed. Playful and with a fine sense of humor they interpret the pictures. The act of dressing and changing, positioning and being positioned as well as arranging is re-contextualized by the female reenactment. Here a bow is tied, there a sleeve plucked on, one foot is moved into the correct position. Being the portrayed and at the same time portraying she is questioning the position of object and subject in the visual media. She is the painter and the model, observing her own gaze and being conscious of the gazes of the audience. A film about tights, tulle and the process of transformation. (Angela Queins… >>>
Premiere:
German Premiere
Nominated:
Goldener Key
- Director: Helen Lanwehr,Judith Greitemann,Angela Queins
A sparse room with a single power plug. The jewel: a copy machine. Leather, metal, fur. A place where you don‘t sit squarely at a table with flowers and a salt shaker, but where you explore all dimensions of the space. Unwielding forms. Between 1981 and 1996, the lesbian-run „Pelze Multimedia“ in West Berlin was a beloved and notorious venue for experimental art and music, for sex parties, bar nights and avant-garde fashion shows staged on a scaffolding. Interviews with three of the showrunners are intertwined with private archive materials. SUBJECT SPACES explores the memory of a subculture, the question of feminist heritage and an aesthetic practice that stood in stark contrast to large parts of the women‘s movement at the time.… >>>
Premiere:
World Premiere
