GM18 photos

photo: Denys Karlinskyy

photo: Denys Karlinskyy

femen back stage getting ready for a workshop/demo. they have been location scouting all day & preparing a protest the following day.      

photo:Pitt Sauerwein

photo:Pitt Sauerwein

Marco Baravalle from S.a.L.E.-Docks talks about the first solo exhibition which his group has put on at their artist/activist fun space in Venice. Soon we'll be completely fearless is the great title of the exhibition. Italy is experiencing a cultural upheaval through activism. Artists and organizers are taking over spaces in Rome, Milan... Marco is working on setting up a tight network and I am sure this will be spreading outside of Italian boarders.

The Kampnagel audience show admiration for Femen. The economical straights that a large part of the population are victims of in the Ukrain,  basically forces many femanles into prostitution for lack of other job choices. Many are trying to survive from €150 or €200 a month. The government is actively promoting prostitution as a driving economical force in the Ukraine.

GM 18, june 9, 2012

hi,

it was so so hard to get the visas for the FEMEN activists & now that they are here in Hamburg they will be giving a workshop lecture this evening & tomorrow a protest will take place on the Reeperbahn.
here is their call out below, - bring your cameras, umbrellas, free mind to rethink feminism, human rights &   the plainly in sight exploitations which we have become numb to.

yours,

Melissa Logan



Dear friends
Tomorrow 10th of June Ukrainian movement FEMEN will protest in Hamburg against sex-bussiness as new form of fascism. the protest will start at 11oclock, Herbertstrase, Boutique bizarre.
contact tf +380675384441 Inna Shevchenko
we invite you and ask you to share this info for your colleagues.
your Femen

FEMEN: 3 members of the feminist activist gang will be sharing their methods of intervention collected  over years of radical actions. Femen was founded in 2008 by an appalled Anna Hutsol who could not sit passively any longer watching the false promises of 'arranged Marriages' and human trafficking in a misogynist society as well as the Ukraine being used as the whore house of Europe. Their cause has spread further fighting the feminist war the world over, and yes, this is growing!
Be ready for action and come to the workshop, naked & courageous!

VOINA: (originally invited to this GM) We tried it all, escape routs by sea & land, we found matching passports for them to use. But the problem was mostly how to get them back into Russia, where their fight is being fought & not to fit them into some artist residencies where the luxury  problems seep into & tarnish the radical fire. Voina are staying in hiding in Russia, we are presenting a talk & video screening.

THE CLINTWOOD SHOW: Old school hip hop was the voice of freedom & equality coming from the rough predominately african american hoods just 20 years after the civil rights movement in the US. Today a lot of that has been lost to Piles of cash, Tits & Ass, violence & misogyny. Timor Litzenberger & Stepha Zanella a.k.a. Frau Zapatista have built new beats over the music that should not be left behind. Hip hop cover songs ...electroRapCover/oldSchool/NewBeats, Get  High on Low Frequencies.



links
femen: https://vimeo.com/17075878
Voina:http://en.free-voina.org/

GM 16, Mermaid

ANN LIV YOUNG'S MERMAID SHOW

The limitations that lives have through the ages, with or without tales, the ecstatic days of gangs splashing through oceans & the pain, isolation & torture of captured creatures, sometimes consumed by starving sailors. The mermaid show is the mermaid myths through time, collected reports of sightings, not of the silly pin up transferred to water, but it is a mermaid that has peeling, webbed skin, you know, it is not easy living in water.



https://vimeo.com/38373237

Ann Liv Young at Kampnagel in Hamburg: MERMAID washes up on the Elbe River

By Imran Shafique

Published: March 11, 2012

       

Fabulate sailors for centuries over whether YOU really are: mermaids. Wonderful nature, longed for on lonely nights on board.
THIS mermaid is washable!
Washed up on the south bank of Elbe River. Splish splash, her gray-blue tail dries there at seven degrees Celsius in the first timid spring sunshine – but as soon as it disappears behind the clouds, it would be warmer in the water …
WHO IS THE MERMAID?
In the marine costume puts US artist Ann Liv Young, appearing this weekend at Kampnagel. The New Yorker is known for her radical performances. The “Mermaid Show” (“Mermaid Show”).
What’s it about? “I’m caught by sailors. I ripped out of my element. Cannot talk, do not move me. Still am not a helpless girl,” she says – and bites on the stage in raw fish.
For her performance slipped in the Young-made especially for her tail. Outer silicone, latex inside, to foot parts as in a diving suit, to be flexible. A mermaid, the art is.
In Copenhagen, there is a bronze in the harbor, which became the symbol of the city. The Hamburg mermaid is not forever – she’s flesh and blood.

Read more: http://www.lhrtimes.com/2012/03/11/ann-liv-young-at-kampnagel-in-hamburg-mermaid-washes-up-on-the-elbe-river/#ixzz1wRoE1GYE

Dance Review

You Will Get Wet; You May Get Soaked. And Skip the Sushi.

Ann Liv Young’s ‘Mermaid Show’ at La MaMa

Ian Douglas for The New York Times

From left, Kevin Wratten, Marissa Mickelberg, Michael A. Guerrero and Ann Liv Young.

By GIA KOURLAS

Published: May 18, 2012

Beyond nudity and yelling — common ingredients in performance art — the reputation of Ann Liv Young is that she is ruthless, shameless and takes no prisoners. She may wear disguises, yet she never masks her impatience with the person running the sound or a fellow cast member, who often turns out to be her real-life partner, Michael A. Guerrero.

Breaking news about the arts, coverage of live events, critical r

In a recent Twitter post about her “Mermaid Show,” Ms. Young, who is pregnant with her second child, did offer a warning: “i will be uncomfortable. you may be too.”

Opening on Thursday night as part of the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival in the East Village, “Mermaid Show” is Ms. Young at her most ferocious. Naked from the waist up, Ms. Young — wearing a scaly mermaid tail, contact lenses that turn her irises black, under-eye slashes for gill slits and peeling pancake makeup — was more “Orca” than “Splash.” You don’t want to swim with her; you want to bolt for dry land.

In “Mermaid,” her sailor minions made that difficult. Wielding buckets of water, they operated like an indoor sprinkler system. Ms. Young’s works are never about passive viewing, but in her popular Sherry shows, she riles people up with words, goading audience members into confessing their secrets through improvisational dialogue.

“Mermaid,” a set piece that isn’t conventionally participatory, provokes audience reaction through movement.

As Ms. Young reclined on her back in a mint green pool filled with water, webbed fingers and strands of her long reddish wig hung over its sides. Mr. Guerrero read a text explaining that if a sailor refuses a mermaid’s seduction, he perishes. Nearby was a heaving mound of dirt — all signs pointed to a person trapped inside — with miniature dolls stuck on its mountainous top.

A thread throughout all of Ms. Young’s performance pieces is popular songs. More than just a tool for setting the scene, music is what transforms her into her characters; it fuels her performance energy.

Starting with Foreigner’s “Cold as Ice,” the piece turned more intimate with Sam Cooke’s “You Were Made for Me” and, later, a mash-up of Jewel and Joan Baez. Such gentle moments also contrasted with the main event, in which Ms. Young, now an enraged sea lion, tore from the stage to thrash her way into the risers, where there were no chairs.

At close range, Ms. Young’s ravaged mermaid looked diseased. She serenaded an impressively stoic man in the audience (“Come swim with me, and be my sailor,” she sang, while staring into his eyes and touching his face) and then went rabid on a raw fish, ripping out chunks with her teeth and spitting them at us. It smelled worse than unrefrigerated bodega sushi.

The fish-dodging scene lasted probably two minutes, but it seemed like two hours. Beyond the obvious — it was gross — the act resonated in terms of character development. Isn’t this, after all, exactly how a mermaid would ravage a fish? The way the terrified audience fled from Ms. Young as she hoisted her 40-pound tail and her pregnant belly up the risers was priceless. Still, I must defend the group: She was a monster.        

GM 15, February 24, 2012

WE FOUND HER ON THE LOST HIGHWAY

This evening was based on loosing oneself in order to find ons self, a phenix method which is very much present in the work of Mathilde Ter Heijne. Nina Power's talk was partially an police report from an officer arresting Nina mixed with a paper on activism & young women.

GM 14: Community Action Center, June 1, 2011

Community Action Center is an erotic film made by artists A.K. Burns & A.L. Steiner and many more mostly New York Based artists.
This is a very beautiful X rated porn with a great soundtrack, yes, including a Chicks on Speed & Dirty Disco Youth piece.
Community Action Center is a new kind of film, it does not fit into existing categories. CAC confuses who is on top & who is a bottom, it integrates porn cliches which become ecstatic, aesthetic  moments.
CAC is at the same time a manual, a juicy how to ... We had a bit of a yellow press scandal here in Hamburg. The screening was was extremely full & also included a hetero normative curious fraction who generally do not come to GM nights. The Bild Zeitung did not mention that a lot of the porn was lesbian, which was fine, an older man asked ma 3/4 through the film, if Pony, the mainly featured artist was male of female. I think & I hope this sexual confusion was not an isolated incident with this man & I find it an important contemporary attitude towards sexual identities, post gender, post gay/straight, inclusive, exclusive, different vs normal. The individual make up of a person is more interesting, perhaps I have 1/4 boy, 1/2 shy girl & 1/4 hot mom, and tomorrow is a new mix and not a fixed label which confines instead of allowing for the free movement of the human Eros.

  Funny yellow press/BILD Zeitung, for some reason the 

so called serious press do no seem to get it. Perhaps next year.    

In the meantime MOMA has purchased the film for their collection and A.K. & A.L. successfully fund-raised cash to pay the artists & to send the film on tour all over the U.S.A. including smaller towns where the screening is especially important.

GM 13 march 19, photos

Gudrun Ankele gives a lecture on the future of feminist praxis, the group oriented cells, a move away from the individual, 'star' fixated praxis to a future hive of activisum.

Performance by Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkacova. IF NOT US,WHO? IF NOT NOW, WHEN?

DAT POLITICS!