LONDON: The Horse Hospital

Friday 2nd August, 2013

6:30pm

Event information

2 & 3 AUG 2013
WOMEN ON THE EDGE OF TIME
A WEEKEND OF FEMINIST SCIENCE FICTION
ALL EVENTS ARE £5 ADVANCE / £6.50 ON THE DOOR OR £12 ADVANCE FOR A 2 DAY PASS
The inexhaustible and speculative realms of science fiction have traditionally and continue to be an effective and vital arena to play out the various potentials of feminist politics and ideologies, a platform to re-imagine and critique the current structures, norms and gender/identity constructs and lay bare the most fundamental and pervasive of injustices.

“No other genres so actively invite representations of the ultimate goals of feminism: worlds free of sexism, worlds in which women’s contributions (to science) are recognized and valued, worlds in which the diversity of women’s desire and sexuality, and worlds that move beyond gender.” – Elyce Rae Helford

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FRIDAY 2ND AUGUST – 7:30PM

Club Des Femmes is proud to host an evening of feminist future vision. What will the woman of tomorrow be like? Will technology govern our future? Or Nature? Or will we?

We’re offering you the chance to share future visions by two of the world’s most exciting women directors see Tilda Swinton four times over in Lynn Hershman-Leeson’s Teknolust: a critique of a world where science controls our destiny, and Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi: an encouragement to an eco-consciousness now before it’s too late.

Plus, we’re asking you to help create our very own Club Des Femmes’ Futurewoman. Working with filmmaker and artist Lisa Gornick, join us for a night of performative zine-making. Bring your future visions, utopian ideas, texts, images, visions and concepts and we’ll publish an amalgam of the night’s findings of what Club Des Femmes women want for the future. It’s time to make a plan.

TEKNOLUST Director: Lynn Hershman-Leeson. 2002. USA. 85 mins With Tilda Swinton, Jeremy Davies, James Urbaniak

PUMZI Director: Wanuri Kahiu. 2010. South Africa-Kenya. 21 mins With Chantelle Burger, Kudzani Moswela http://www.clubdesfemmes.com/ http://www.lisagornick.com/

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SATURDAY 3RD AUGUST – 6:30PM
FLAMING EARS

Angela Hans Scheirl, Ursula Pürrer, and Dietmar Schipek – Austria, 1991, 84 mins

A vengeful comic book artist, a red rubber suit wearing alien and a pyromaniac performance artist play out a story of love and revenge in the lesbian populated future city of Ache. This violent and sexual anti-romantic tale takes cues from the early short films of Ursula Pürrer and Angela Hans Schier in its playfulness and provocation. Blown up from super-8, the grainy texture and saturated colours add to its DIY and experimental appeal and heighten the artificiality of this crumbling fantasy world.

“Imagine the film that J.G. Ballard might have made if he’d been born an Austrian dyke.” B. Ruby Rich San Francisco Weekly

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SATURDAY 3RD AUGUST – 9:00PM
INVISIBLE ADVERSARIES

Valie Export – Austria, 1977, 112 mins

In the debris of a civilization in decline and the painful disintegration of a relationship Anna’s grasp on reality is flagging rapidly. Determined that extra-terrestrials are controlling the minds of those that surround her, increasing the violence and mobilizing destruction Anna’s interior and material worlds collide with irrationality and paranoia. Simultaneously a sensitively reflexive film about art and being an artist and a radical essay on the self, the image and sexual politics.

“Anna’s schizophrenia is reflected in the juxtapositions of long movie camera takes with violently edited montages: private with public spaces; black & white with colour, still photographs with video, ear splitting sounds with disruptive camera angles.” Artforum, Nov. 1980