In her artistic oeuvre, the American performance and film artist Barbara Hammer (1939–2019) questions the socio-political status quo with an alert eye. At the end of the 1960s she made her first experimental films, in which Hammer autobiographically questioned her status as an openly homosexual person within American society, but also in front of herself. Her narrative style and the way she negotiates virulent social issues are multi-layered and complex – and quite courageous. Openly, ironically, optimistically, cheerfully and explicitly, she  breaks taboos with doctrinal (male) norms without wagging a radical-feminist index finger. Her works are genre-spanning, her visual language and aesthetic sometimes staged and set, sometimes improvised and performative, documentary or fictional.
Barbara Hammer is considered a pioneer of queer film - but her constant examination of the general reality of female life goes far beyond that. Self-confident and unembellished, she lets us in her patriarchal father-daughter relationship, the AIDS debates of the 1990s and her cancer.

TheSkulpturenmuseum Marl shows a cross-section of her oeuvre, which spans over 50 years, and offers a spotlight on the development of aesthetic and narrative means of film and video art. At the same time, the material exhibited in Marl is a vague interim report on a social debate that is still being negotiated on a daily basis.

Barbara Hammer: Would you like to meet your neighbor?

Opening on Sunday, 5th March 2023 at 12 p.m.

Welcome by Claudia Schwidrik-Grebe, Head of Culture Stadt Marl

Introduction by Georg Elben, Director Skulpturenmuseum Marl