"The slide of the image into politics finds concrete expression in the film Tourist as the word 'spectacle' nestles in the Hollywood Hills like an Edward Ruscha painting. Psychic desires of 'tourists' permeate the architecture of seeing. The fleeting spectacle is a series of imaginative possessions, a conquest through the gaze accented by the shots fired on the video arcade game soundtrack. The tourist 'look' is as ephemeral as the animation of the collage suggesting a miniaturizing and glazing of the grandiose wonders of the world." — Kathleen Hulser, "Frames of Passage: Nine Recent Films of Barbara Hammer," Centre Georges Pompidou
Tourist, 1984
16 mm film on video
16 mm film on video, color, sound, 2:43 min, Edition of 7+ 2AP
Estate of Barbara Hammer
Barbara Hammer was born in Hollywood in 1939. Her documentary and experimental films are considered among the earliest and most extensive representations of lesbian identity, love, and sexuality. Accompanying her career as a filmmaker, Hammer has time and again worked with performance and installation. She has participated in group exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial in 1993, the WACK! show at MOCA L.A. and MoMA PS1 in 2007/2008. With film retrospectives at New York’s MoMA in 2010 and the Tate Modern, London, in 2012, the artworld's interest in Hammer's work has recently increased. Hammer has been a teacher for many years and held a professorship at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee (CH). She died in 2019.
Active CinemaInterview
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for Austrian Film Museum, 2018
- Candice Breitz
- Marco A. Castillo
- CATPC
- Alice Creischer
- Chto Delat
- Clegg & Guttmann
- Eugenio Dittborn
- Heinrich Dunst
- Anna Ehrenstein
- Estate of León Ferrari
- Estate of Barbara Hammer
- The Cabinet of Ramon Haze
- Hiwa K
- Renzo Martens
- Chris Martin
- Frédéric Moser & Philippe Schwinger
- Henrike Naumann
- Oswald Oberhuber
- Mario Pfeifer
- Dierk Schmidt
- Tina Schulz
- Santiago Sierra
- Michael E. Smith
- Franz Erhard Walther
- Clemens von Wedemeyer
- Tobias Zielony