The filming tourist. Traveling with Barbara Hammer

A lecture by Sarah Happersberger as part of the Barbara Hammer exhibition Barbara Hammer: Would you like to meet your neighbor?
Tuesday, June 6, 2023 at 7 p.m
Skulpturenmuseum Marl

Barbara Hammer traveled again and again, always taking her camera with her. England, France, Denmark and the Galapagos Islands are just a few of the numerous destinations she visited between the 1970s and 1990s. The filmmaker was also regularly on the road within the United States to collect film material, participate at exhibitions or build up networks with like-minded people. The lecture on Tuesday, 6th June 2023 at 7 p.m. in the exhibition will highlight selected films by Hammer with a view to the motif of the journey. It examines not only how the artist staged the places she visited in front of the camera, but also what role she has as a tourist and traveller. To what extent does she use the film medium to capture her holiday impressions? And which longings are reflected and projected in her films?

Sarah Happersberger is an art historian and curator. From 2017 to 2019 she was part of the curatorial team at the Liverpool Biennial, having previously worked at the Arnolfini in Bristol and the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. She is currently doing her doctorate at the Justus Liebig University in Gießen on collaborative projects by female artists that emerged in the context of the women's movements of the 1970s and 1980s in Germany and the USA. In 2022 she organized an exhibition in Frankfurt am Main on the lesbian-feminist action space "Pelze Multimedia" (Berlin 1981-1996), in which Barbara Hammer also showed her films.

Fig.: Barbara Hammer, Tourist, 1984, still image, courtesy of the estate of Barbara Hammer and KOW Berlin