Global Feminist Forum: Media, Gender and the Performing Self - Reconstructing Identity Online and On-Screen

This mini-screening and discussion brings together three Bay Area artists and art collectives whose work engages with gender, performance, video and the internet.

Anxious to Make (Liat Berdugo + Emily Martinez)’s work focuses on labor and economic precarity associated with so-called “sharing economy”, and the accelerationist, neoliberal landscapes associated with them. In their 2016 video, “Liat Berdugo + Emily Martinez as Five Twins,” they commissioned fake twins sourced from Fiverr.com who double themselves in postproduction. In outsourcing identities to laborers in this economy, this work examines the kinds of subjectivities produced by the sharing economy–as well as how gender is performed and reinscribed through a series of different bodies, races, and geographies.

Lark VCR (aka Lark Adler) makes speculative proposals to explore the pitfalls and possibilities of an increasingly digitized and bioengineered world. Working in hybrid forms of video and web-based media, they leverage humor as an entry point to engage audiences in nondidactic cultural critique. Their 2016 short film, Tattle-Tale Heart,  is a comedic speculative fiction about seductive technologies of biosurveillence and a portrait of queer subculture. Their newer work uses performance on the web itself to choreograph users through non-traditional web experiences about magic, human-computer love, care work, and space-aged settler colonialism.

Minoosh Zomorodinia is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary and ecofeminist artist who makes visible the emotional and psychological reflections of her mind’s eye inspired by nature and her environments. In her video work, performance, and sculpture, she employs walking as a catalyst to reference the power of technology as a colonial structure while negotiating boundaries of land, often inserting her own body to integrate contradictory concepts of “self” to the environment.

This event addresses feminist politics as they are constituted through performance and media, with each artist tackling ideas of sexuality and gender identity, ecofeminism, and labor. By engaging with local artists and artworks in these areas, this event considers the breadth and complexity of practices of feminist ideas in practice and expression.