Shu Lea Cheang is an artist, conceptualist, filmmaker, and networker who has worked in the field of net-based installation, social interface, networked performance, and film production. Her work traverses between hard and soft, sex and politics, fiction and reality, fantasia and earth-bound.
Fresh Kill (1hr 20min) 1996: Shareen and Claire, a lesbian couple living on Staten Island, find themselves ensnared in a vast conspiracy involving a ghost ship of nuclear refuse, ominous television commercials, and deadly cat food.
SEX FISH (6mins) 1993: An erotic lesbian video involving swimming upstream, female power, and fish love. Made as a collaboration under the name E.T. (Ela Troyano) Baby (Jane Castle) Maniac (Cheang). âIn Sex Fish water provides the common denominator for nature imagery and explicit sex. Unlike 1970s feminist imagery, however, nature is sexualized rather than sex naturalized. Dripping from the faucet, spraying against a shower curtain, swirling down a toilet, water leads viewers from one sex scene to another, private to public and back again. Swimming through the video are various fish, seemingly unaware of the derogatory pun they enact, and all gulping enviously as cunnilingus surrounds them.â âChris Straayer, Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-orientations in Film and Video (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)
SEX BOWL (7:43 mins) 1994: All forms of human sport become sites for sexual play and celebratory eroticism.
âThe tapeâs images are quick, suggestive, and sexy: fingers moving into bowling balls, shoe-smelling and toe-sucking, a dog wearing chain jewelry, fish being wrapped at the market, young naked couples having sexâŚ. Edited like a music video, the image track is a constant flow of fetishes that lure us into the promiscuous pace of girls who keep lists of their sexual encounters.â âChris Straayer, Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-orientations in Film and Video (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)
FINGERS AND KISSES (4:35 mins) 1995: Cheang has taken her camera to the streets for a candid glimpse of lesbian public sexuality. If Asian women and lesbians share a certain amount of invisibility in the culture, Fingers and Kisses offers not only a bold representation of both, but a challenge to the question âWhat do lesbians do?â Tokyoâs own out-and-loud music by Chu punctuates the narrative as what begins in the streets continues under the sheets.
COMING HOME (5mins) 1995: This humorous video begins with two womenâone white, the other Asianâattempting to fit into a Japanese bathtub. The awkward fitting of bodies into a small space is just one of the allegorical scenarios dramatized in a pressing appeal for lesbian rights. In a game of hanafuda (flower cards), the terms of lesbian domesticity are cleverly played out according to such legalities as joint property, social security, and pensions.
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Enjoy A Voice of Her Own / Una Voz Propia, an evening of music, storytelling, and film celebrating the cultures, stories, and extraordinary talents that immigrants bring to the state and communitiesâand standing with them when they need support the most.
The evening will feature live music and storytelling by Gemanereida BarragĂĄn-CruzâMariachi Singer and Storyteller, and culminate in the world premiere of a new 15-minute documentary about her extraordinary artistic journey and the power of her voice.
More than a film screening, this is an evening to gather in community, experience music and stories live, and celebrate Gemanereida and the many ways immigrant artists enrich the cultural life of our community.
See full details at tomorrowtheater.org.
Tickets $15. James Spooner joins PAM CUT for a screening of his film Afro-Punk, followed by an author talk for his new book It Starts With Anger. Books will be available for sale on site. This program is co-presented by Literary Arts as part of the Cover-to-Cover program.
In her premiere video project, French conceptual artist Sophie Calle joins with Gregory Shephard to create a voyeuristic tour de force. Armed with camcorders, Calle and her collaborator/partner Shephard head West in his Cadillac convertible to produce and document a real-life narrative of their journey and their relationship. With America as the backdrop for this unconventional coast-to-coast road movie, Calle and Shephard each narrates and records a personal diary, presenting strikingly different versions of the narrative/relationship.
Aiming their dueling camcorders, the protagonists chronicle the elusive landscapes of human relations, wrestling to reconcile self, sexuality, and desire. The viewer is challenged to reconsider the subjective and cultural roles imposed by gender, sexuality, power, and tradition. Throughout, Calle seeks to redefine through personal investigation the terms and parameters of subject/object, public/private, truth, fiction, and role-playing. The quasi-documentary style evokes the films of Chris Marker, to whom No Sex Last Night (Double-Blind) is dedicated, as well as the work of writer and photographer HervĂŠ Guibert.
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Tickets $15. Join us for Nora Ephronâs cozy, bookish romantic comedy that makes the dial-up internet age feel magical. Grab a bingo card curated by Violet Hex and play along as Kathleen Kelly and Joe Fox fall in love one anonymous email at a time!