Double Strength, 1978

16 mm film on HD video

The film intelligently explores new sound-image and image-image relations as it acknowledges and confronts the old problems of woman-to-woman relationships (specifically one between the filmmaker and a trapeze artist). The film parallels the different stages of the relationship, offering abstract views on the rewards of a longterm love while the actual communication between the two women is in process of breaking down. All the audio and visual clues for the demise are strong: busy signals and voices that say the number is disconnected, still photographs expressing rage, dissonant chords, a pulsating black-and-white face of one lover as a shocking backdrop for the movements of the other.

Barbara Hammer, Double Strength, 1978, Transferred 16mm film, 4:3, color, sound, 14:03 min, Edition of 7 + 2AP

16 mm film on HD video, 4:3, color, sound, 14:03 min, Edition of 7 + 2AP

Credits

Text: Andrea Weiss

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Estate of Barbara Hammer

**Blue Film No 6: Love Is Where You Find It, 1998**

**Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of Aids, 1986**

**Would You Like to Meet Your Neighbor? A New York Subway Tape, 1985**

Biography

Barbara Hammer was born in Hollywood in 1939. Her documentaries and experimental films are among the earliest and most comprehensive depictions of lesbian identity, love, and sexuality. For more than five decades, Hammer was an increasingly influential voice of queer feminism, and a chronicler of women's self-empowerment in the U.S. and many other places around the world. Following film retrospectives at New York's MoMA in 2010, Tate Modern, London in 2012, and her first solo exhibitions at KOW beginning in 2011, the art world began to take an interest in Hammer's now historic body of work, which includes performances, installations, and works on paper. Numerous institutional exhibitions and successes followed, and today Hammer is considered one of the greatest examples of politically engaged feminist art. Hammer was a teacher for many years and held a professorship at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee (CH). She passed away in 2019.

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