A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner:
Community Action Center
Monday 6 June 2011, 7pm
Tate Modern, London
This screening presents the UK debut of Community Action Center (2010, 69 minutes), a sociosexual video by A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner that explores sexuality through a vibrant, intergenerational community built on collaboration, friendship, sex and art. Drawing on artistic precedents from Jack Smith, Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, Paul McCarthy and Ana Mendieta to groundbreaking 1970s experiments in pornography by James Bidgood, Fred Halsted, Joe Gage and Wakefield Poole, the video is a political adventure that investigates the hidden iconography of the queer underground. It exposes, unsettles and explores the limits and accepted paradigms of feminism, collectivism, pornography and sexual identity.
‘The video plunders queer theory, third-wave feminism, lesbian separatism, and gay-male Crisco Disco lucubrations, offering not a reconciliation of their differences but rather a site for their promiscuous entanglements. It’s porn with an agenda… ‘It is an action movie,’ the artists add, winkingly. And in this sense it is meant to turn you on, to spark contagious identifications and disidentifications that might extend the reach of this roving ‘center’... It is this optimistic engagement with the possibilities for sexual reorientation that makes CAC both art and something wilder.’ (David Velasco, Artforum)
The video is set to a soundtrack of music by Chicks on Speed, Effi Briest, Electrelane, K8 Hardy, Lesbians on Ecstasy, Light Asylum, MEN, Motherland, NGUZUNGUZU, I.U.D. (Lizzi Bougatsos & Sadie Laska), Kinski and Thee Majesty (Genesis P-Orridge), with original compositions by Justin Bond, Nick Hallett & Sam Greenleaf Miller, Ashland Mines & Wu Tsang, Sergei Tcherepnin and Tri-State Area.
The screening will be followed by a conversation with A.K. Burns, A.L. Steiner, artist K8 Hardy and critic Elisabeth Lebovici.
A.K. Burns is an interdisciplinary artist and compulsive collaborator who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Burns uses sculpture, video, drawing and social actions to transverse the perverse poetry of sexuality, power and language. Burns has been a frequent contributor and active member of both LTTR and Ridykeulous. She is a founding member of the artists activist group W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy). Burns is co-editor of the annual trans-feminist journal, Randy, with Sophie Mörner at Capricious Publishing. She received her MFA from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Her work has show internationally and can be found in the The Judith Rothschild Contemporary Drawings Collection at MoMA, New York.
A.L. Steiner uses constructions of photography, video, installation, collage, collaboration, performance and curatorial work as seductive tropes channeled through the sensibility of a cynical queer eco-feminist androgyne. She is a collective member of Chicks on Speed, co-curator of the project Ridykeulous, founding member of W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) and collaborates with numerous visual and performing artists. Her work has been recently featured at P.S.1./MoMA and The New Museum (New York), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (California), Sofia City Art Gallery (Bulgaria) and upcoming at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art (Poland) and ICA/Boston (Massachusetts). She is visiting faculty at University ofCalifornia, Los Angeles and University of Southern California, and is represented by Taxter & Spengemann.
Adult content, viewer discretion advised.
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