Artists Moving Image Shorts: Tender Torture

Curated by Tom Krasny.

Part of CinemaAttic’s LADS: TOXIC MASCULINITY, a programme that denounces toxic masculinity attitudes in communities around the world.

This programme explores queer and kinky elements in three artists’ moving image works. The main curiosity will be directed at the body as a meeting point between subjectivity and social expectations and restrictions.

Living within a culture of dominance that uncritically replicates automatic beliefs and behaviours, often leads to the accumulation of trauma in the body, and its protection and veiling by feelings of shame and fear. This is especially true for people whose *intersecting identities are underrepresented in the dominant culture.

Countering this, the altered state, permission for experimentation, and safety measures that are available in the kink, filmmaking, and performance toolkits, offer a space to go deep and re-examine the sediments that experiences of oppression deposit in our bodies and minds.
As the event name suggests, being in that space can be uncomfortable and scary, as well as playful, humbling, and humorous. Creative, open and responsible engagement can allow us to test out new ways of relating to ourselves, to prevailing beliefs, and to each other.

*intersecting identities: (including but not limited to gender identity, gender expression, race, ethnicity, class, faith, disability and sexual orientation)

Films and Content Notes

One Summer Evening (Gil Yefman)
Yefman’s work offers a queer decoding of the poem ‘One Summer Evening” by Israel’s national poet- H.N Bialik. By reclaiming Jewish ritual objects and repurposing them as gender affirming garb, Yefman questions archaic gendered limitations, and points towards more expansive possibilities of expression.
Content notes: religious artefacts repurposed as feminine garments and accessories. Mention of gender barriers in traditional use of these objects. Mention of sex work in the poem (poking at societal hypocrisy toward sexual needs and expression).

Davidka (Lior Shvil)
In this work, the artist’s body is integrated into the kinetic mechanism of a sculptural mortar machine. Strapped to its place with the caress of a corset, his body takes part in a perpetual closed loop of charge and release, pain and pleasure, cause and effect.
Content notes: partial nudity (exposed buttocks). depiction of a mortar machine-like mechanism. Depiction of a body bound to a machine-like mechanism. Sexualisation of corporal punishment. Mention of parental violence.

Out (Roee Rosen)
This short film makes a metaphorical connection between a BDSM scene and an exorcism scene. It humorously describes internalised and unchecked prejudice as a “demon” needing to be chased out of the person who holds the beliefs. That “demon” is personified as Israel’s blatantly racist former minister of foreign affairs, Avigdor Lieberman.
Content notes: discussion of racist opinions and beliefs (one of the ritual participants is telling about her parents’ racist beliefs). Explanation and depiction of BDSM power roles. depicted metaphorical “exorcism” of racist beliefs- done by whipping the body of the “possessed”. Mention of rogue abortion (using as it as a metaphor). Mention of concentration camps and Nazis. Nudity.

The films will last 1h20m. After the films there will be an hour-long pre-recorded conversation between Subira Joy, Finch Honeker and Darcy Leigh, co editors of Trans Kink Zine (Easter Road Press). The event will end at approximately 10:20pm.