Join us on Sunday 19 February at the Tate Modern Starr Auditorium for It’s Like Staring Someone Out Who’s Not Even Looking at You as part of Barbara Hammer The Fearless Frame, Programme 15: The Scopophiliac Audience [book tickets HERE].

First performed as part of Auto Italia’s collaborative project with Cinenova, Bodies Assembling, this performative screening by Kate Cooper, Leslie Kulesh and Jess Weisner – produced by Auto Italia – will be re-staged and re-contextualised within Tate Modern’s extensive Barbara Hammer programme. Developing dialogues initiated at Bodies Assembling, this screening re-examines questions of distribution and dispersion of the work – and the image – of female artists.

Newly framed within the Hammer Season’s critical reflections on feminist legacies, the work will consider the ‘place’ of women in contemporary mainstream culture and their control over their own image within this arena. The audience participates in this image exchange – encouraged to experience the work as voyeur, as active participant and as a ‘fan’ of feminism. Through a layering and re-working of archival footage and live performance from audience members, the screening engenders a space for interrogating both feminism and the image of the feminine in film-production and distribution today.

Shown alongside Hammer’s works Audience (1982) and Multiple Orgasm (1976), as well an intervention from the group that have been meeting at the Lambeth Women’s Group, the screening will be followed by a roundtable discussion including Auto Italia’s Richard John Jones. Programme 15 will raise questions relating to the changes in audience for feminist and queer feminist cinema. Looking back to the distribution of Hammer’s work in the late ‘70s and her largely queer, lesbian and women-only audiences, the event seeks to question what it means to re-situate Hammer’s practice alongside contemporary notions of community and network.