Optic Nerve, 1985

16 mm film on video

"Barbara Hammer's Optic Nerve is a powerful personal reflection on family and aging. Hammer employs filmed footage which, through optical printing and editing, is layered and manipulated to create a compelling meditation on her visit to her grandmother in a nursing home. The sense of sight becomes a constantly evolving process of reseeing images retrieved from the past and fused into the eternal present of the projected image. Hammer has lent a new voice to the long tradition of personal meditation in the avant-garde of the American independent cinema." -- John Hanhardt, Biennial Exhibition Catalogue, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1987

Barbara Hammer, Optic Nerve 1985, 16mm film, color, sound by Helen Thorington, 16:41 min, Edition of 7+ 2AP

16 mm film on video, color, sound by Helen Thorington, 16:41 min, Edition of 7+ 2AP

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Estate of Barbara Hammer

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

**THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD ACCORDING TO A LESBIAN, 1988**

**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. Since, her work is still ongoingly displayed in major solo exhibitions such as Would You Like To Meet Your Neighbor? (Skulpturenmuseum Marl 2023), Women I Love (Ratio 3, San Francisco 2022 and Frans Josefs Kai 3, Vienna 2021), tell me there is a lesbian forever (Company Gallery, New York 2021), Sisters! (La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barceola 2020).

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Texts & Interviews