With a career spanning over 50 years, Barbara Hammer is widely recognized as a pioneer of queer cinema. Hammer created a groundbreaking body of experimental work that illuminated lesbian histories, lives, and representations, while simul- taneously pushing the boundaries of avant-garde cinema. This presentation highlights her early photographic output—a series of extraordinarily lyrical and poignant works made in the 1970s, alongside rare collages and Hammer’s very first video work Schizy (1968). The work is poignant, elemental and the root of all work to follow - a work that saw Hammer explore the reality she saw, what was expected of her and how to capture this. As a totality these works embody a poetic exploration of sexuality, women’s pleasure, and freedom. Throughout the 1970s, Hammer toured the United States, Africa, and Europe, making film after film about women and the lesbian experience— subjects that had rarely been portrayed by a woman, for women, on screen before. During this prolific era, she created now-legendary expe- rimental films, including Sisters! (1973), Dyketactics (1974), Multiple Orgasm (1976), Sappho (1978), and Double Strength (1978), effectively inventing lesbian cinema at a time when such material had largely been confined to the pornographic imagination of male artists and filmmakers. While creating this iconic body of work, Hammer also photographed her travels, lovers, moments of community and kinship with collaborators, as well as private and public performances. Her photographs capture friends, strangers, and intimate moments, challenging traditional notions of female sexuality by presenting it in all its complexity—messy, abstract, and deeply human.
