“My work makes these invisible bodies and histories visible. As a lesbian artist, I found little existing representation, so I put lesbian life on this blank screen, leaving a cultural record for future generations.” —Barbara Hammer

With a career spanning fifty years, Barbara Hammer is recognized as a pioneer of queer cinema. A visual artist working primarily in film and video, Hammer created a groundbreaking body of experimental work that illuminates lesbian histories, lives and representations.

Barbara Hammer didn’t just make films—she carved out a space where queer lives, queer bodies, and queer histories could speak, shimmer, and rupture the frame.

This retrospective brings together six works from Hammer’s visionary practice, spanning nearly five decades of radical image-making. Each film included in the program is a fragment of a much larger project: to bring lesbian existence out of invisibility, and to push cinema itself into more sensual, embodied forms.

Her breakthrough short Dyketactics (1974) is often hailed as one of the first lesbian-made lesbian films. In just four minutes, Hammer creates a rush of bodies, textures, and montage that reclaims erotic imagery from the male gaze.

No No Nooky T.V. (1987) takes the opposite route—a satirical, glitchy critique of how sex, gender, and desire are represented by technology and in mass media, using talking TVs and faux-PSA interruptions to disrupt straight logic.

Superdyke Meets Madame X (1976), co-directed with Max Almy, captures their relationship from the first kiss to breakup, exploring lesbian intimacy and the medium of video tape.

Lesbian Whale (2015) is composed of animated Hammer’s notebook drawings —part archival hallucination, part aquatic metaphor, it channels queer myth through sound and gesture, grounding the personal in communal through commentary from her peers.

Her landmark feature Nitrate Kisses (1992) was her first full-length film, interweaving underground histories of queer love with explicit sexuality, decaying film stock, and the voices of those erased from the official record.

Finished after her death in 2019, A Month of Single Frames (2019), done in collaboration with filmmaker Lynne Sachs, expands the notion of relationships among women from the erotic to the deeply intimate, intellectual, and emotional companionship.

Hammer’s work does not offer easy answers. It asks us to look again, to feel differently, and to reimagine the role of film not just as a recording device, but as a sensual, political act. This program celebrates Hammer’s body of work as a body in itself: queer, defiant, and always in motion.

“I choose film and video as a medium to make the invisible, visible. Anyone can be left out of history. I am compelled to reveal and celebrate marginalized peoples whose stories have not been told. A multi-level cinema that engages them viscerally and intellectually activates my audiences. I want people to leave the theater with fresh perceptions and emboldened to take active and political stances for social change in a global environment.”—Barbara Hammer

Find out more about Barbara Hammer's life and work.

Courtesy of the Estate of Barbara Hammer, New York and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.