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Yours, KOW

Sanctus, 1990

Transferred 16 mm film

Sanctus is a film of rephotographed moving x-rays, originally shot by Dr. James Sibley Watson and his colleagues. Making the invisible visible, the film reveals the skeletal structure of the human body as it protects the hidden fragility of interior organ systems.

Writes Hammer: "In making Sanctus I was concerned about the contradictory qualities of beauty and danger of the images that were made by radiation. I delighted in the imagery and at the same time I imagined the deleterious effects of the image making on the subjects. This was my dilemma in making the film and continues until today. I rely on the viewers' intuition of a foreboding, a sense of ambivalence, an unsteady non-homogenous emotive state, a not-knowing."

Barbara Hammer, Sanctus, 1990, Transferred 16mm film, 4:3, color, b&w, sound by Neil B. Rolnick, 18:18 min, Edition of 7+ 2AP
Barbara Hammer, Sanctus, 1990, Transferred 16mm film, 4:3, color, b&w, sound by Neil B. Rolnick, 18:18 min, Edition of 7+ 2AP
Barbara Hammer, Sanctus, 1990, Transferred 16mm film, 4:3, color, b&w, sound by Neil B. Rolnick, 18:18 min, Edition of 7+ 2AP
Barbara Hammer, Sanctus, 1990, Transferred 16mm film, 4:3, color, b&w, sound by Neil B. Rolnick, 18:18 min, Edition of 7+ 2AP
Barbara Hammer, Sanctus, 1990, Transferred 16mm film, 4:3, color, b&w, sound by Neil B. Rolnick, 18:18 min, Edition of 7+ 2AP
Barbara Hammer, Sanctus, 1990, Transferred 16mm film, 4:3, color, b&w, sound by Neil B. Rolnick, 18:18 min, Edition of 7+ 2AP
Barbara Hammer, Sanctus, 1990, Transferred 16mm film, 4:3, color, b&w, sound by Neil B. Rolnick, 18:18 min, Edition of 7+ 2AP
Barbara Hammer, Sanctus, 1990, Transferred 16mm film, 4:3, color, b&w, sound by Neil B. Rolnick, 18:18 min, Edition of 7+ 2AP
Barbara Hammer, Sanctus, 1990, Transferred 16mm film, 4:3, color, b&w, sound by Neil B. Rolnick, 18:18 min, Edition of 7+ 2AP
Barbara Hammer, Sanctus, 1990, Transferred 16mm film, 4:3, color, b&w, sound by Neil B. Rolnick, 18:18 min, Edition of 7+ 2AP
Barbara Hammer, Sanctus, 1990, Transferred 16mm film, 4:3, color, b&w, sound by Neil B. Rolnick, 18:18 min, Edition of 7+ 2AP
Barbara Hammer, Sanctus, 1990, Transferred 16mm film, 4:3, color, b&w, sound by Neil B. Rolnick, 18:18 min, Edition of 7+ 2AP

16mm film on video, 4:3, color, b&w, sound by Neil B. Rolnick, 18:18 min, Edition of 7+ 2AP

This film was preserved by Electronic Arts Intermix and the Academy Film Archive through the National Film Preservation Foundation's Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.

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Estate of Barbara Hammer

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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