My Touch Makes Me Visible!
Curatorial Statement: Maike Mia Höhne and Jyoti Mistry
Soft silky skin glows with youthful radiance. Skin with wrinkles, lines from stories of life lived. Skin blue, bruised, beaten and punched. Skin ripped open, torn from pain. Skin stretched in birth and folded with age. Skin sown together to heal (hide) wounds. Skin hungry for desire. Skin brushed-up close in pleasure. Skin runs deep, not skin deep. The skin is surface. The cinema screen is skin.
My Touch Makes Me Visible! is an exploration of how filmmakers have used the skin of the screen to draw us closer to the sensory experiences of women from across different geographic terrains and from varied political contexts. My Touch Makes Me Visible! is a kaleidoscope of aesthetic forms that reflects the polyvocal positions of feminisms from different histories and various women’s experiences. The films are in conversation with each other, complementing each other, refracting against one another – to invite audiences to engage with the subjectivities women share and the differences that hold them apart. The forms of the films are each in themselves radical acts of resistance against hegemonic cinematic conventions and shows how women, trans and queer filmmakers have used the camera and the power of images to reorientate the gaze against objectification towards a praxis of image making that is liberating. Laura U. Marks describes “haptic visuality” as a sensorial cinematic experience that is tactile and evokes memories and experiences of the body. The sense of being touched brings us close to the subjectivity of characters and their feelings and in this process implicates us as the spectators. We are drawn to these images because they remind us of our own bodies, our memories and connects us as spectators to the cultures that we embody. The programme is a statement about feelings, emotions and a commitment to the body as a site of political action, social evolution and intimate exchange where love is a transformative act.
Bodies Protest and Resist is a selection of films which includes the work of Hito Steyerl and Sarah Abu Abdallah to reflect patriarchal structures and the broad spectrum of violences that continue to ravage the lives of so many women globally but also the triumphant ways that women survive in spite of these continued repressions.
Cinema of Senses spans the films of Ulrike Zimmermann, Ruth Lingford and Danielle Arbid, in an explosive experience of the tactile and haptic on screen. It is a celebration of the sensual, the erotic and the sexual. The films are intimate reflections of how desire is imagined, the fulfillment of pleasures and the intimacies of gender fluidity. This selection invites the audience to reflect on those parts of women’s lives that have not been touched and the urgency to rediscover the body on new terms.
Woman Work! Through feminist perspectives women’s (domestic) work has been recognized as unpaid work and women continue to be discriminated against in waged labour. Gabrielle Stemmer offers a timely shift in perspective on domestic work to show how young women have monetized cleaning and domesticity by producing a sense of self through social media. In contrast, the films of Katharina Gruezei and Clara Helbig show how waged labour continues to produce exploitative work conditions in which workers remain alienated. Angelika Nguyen’s film remains a poignant reflection on migrant labour and the conditions of structural racism for foreign workers that is resonant with the experiences of so many migrant workers across the globe. This selection of films is a cross section of how women filmmakers have addressed the challenges of representing labour and work and, the representation of women at work.
Flaming Desires Queer Expressions on Screen. Queer politics, queer identity and a queer gaze provides an expanded way of making visible experiences of the world that are not defined by patriarchal or heterosexual structures but show how gender, sexual identity and race are always defined through power structures that define them. Monika Treut is a central figure of the independent German film scene, she went to the USA at the end of the 1980s and, with her convention-critical approach and her progressive perspective on lesbian-gay sexuality, gave decisive impetus to the New Queer Cinema that was just emerging.This section focuses on three of her films Max, Gendernauts and Genderation about the trans and queer community in San Francisco.
My Touch Makes Me Visible! is an invitation to come together. An opportunity for conversation about the politics of the sensorial in women, trans and queer lives. It is a celebration of the bodies we inhabit and the acute awareness that our stories are written on our skins and reflected on the screens.
