Obscene West

Tuesday Sep 29 at 18.00, CFF Centrum för fotografi

In connection with CFFs exhibition of Konstantin Zhukov we present queer videoart from the Baltics that will be screened in the garden of CFF during the whole night. 

The program was first presented at Kaunas Artists’ House (Lithuania) and co-curated by EKKM and Maria Helen Känd, Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė (Kaunas Artist House) and Andra Silapetere (Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art).

“Obscene West. Naglis” (named after the monthly magazine of the gay community in Lithuania in the 90s) is dedicated to queer culture and its manifestations in Lithuania and the neighbouring Baltic countries – Estonia and Latvia. The Naglis section focuses on practices of queer artists and the social context of their works during the end of the past century.

The video program is dedicated to the artworks or filmed video material (TV archives) of the 90s and 00s that analyze the problems related to the views towards queer culture, the self-representation of LGBTQ people and the social turmoil in post-Soviet countries at that time. More broadly, the program focuses on gender equality and feminist approaches in video art.

“Obscene West. Naglis” draws a social landscape of the three newly established nation states and their polarized relations towards gender and its cultural and social status, leading to questions how these histories and relations resonate with the trajectories of global developments and how can we mediate them today.

The works presented at Cinema Queer are:
Anna-Stina Treumund (EST) “Mothers”, 2008, 8 min, Estonian with English subt.
Anna-Stina Treumund “Loser”, 2011, 1 min, English with Estonian subt.
Laura Stasiulytė (LT) “From the Life of Young Ladies”, 2001, 14 min, Lithuanian and English.
Santa Lingevičiūtė (LT) “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” 2008, 4 min 34 s, English.