73 Suspect Words

Peggy Ahwesh 

2000, 4 min, b&w, sound

73 Suspect Words is a deceptively simple and ultimately chilling meditation on the power of text. Ahwesh succinctly delves into one person's obsessive irrationality, and his expressions of fear and anger. Based on a spell-check of the Unabomber's manifesto, the work evokes the violence underlying the key words presented.

Club Vanessa (The London Tape)

Ellen Cantor

1996, 14:55 min, b&w and color, sound

Club Vanessa is a video about "real love" in the form of a sex tape. "Club Vanessa, a video about the present, begins with me fantasizing about what our lives will be like in the future. That we would have a lot of lovers, that there would be real love, but no jealousy. We were trying to reinvest ourselves in this 60s utopian vision and explore in which ways these ideals have affected us. Also, we were reinvesting ourselves in the feminist history of body performance, reanalyzing the female experience as an object of sexual desire." — Ellen Cantor

Coven Services

Alex Bag 

2004, 14:40 min, color, sound

A snapshot of popular culture in the early aughts, Coven Services mixes vignettes of Bag in multiple guises—a spokeswoman for Haliburton, Chase Bank, AOL Time Warner, Bechtel Corporation and other brands—with footage from Paris Hilton's infamous sex tape. In this disparaging look at the daily consumption of tangible and intangible products in a service economy, Bag brings the same pained smile to her promotions of laundry detergent, debit cards and the war in Iraq.

Dyketactics

Barbara Hammer

1974, 4:00 min, b&w and color, sound, 16 mm film on video

"Hammer's films of the '70's are the first made by an openly lesbian American filmmaker to explore lesbian identity, desire and sexuality though avant-garde strategies. Merging the physicality of the female body with that of the film medium, Hammer’s films remain memorable for their pioneering articulation of a lesbian aesthetic.” - Jenni Sorkin, WACK! Art and The Feminist Revolution, 2007.

Warnings

Muntadas

1988, 5:50 min, color, sound

Warnings contrasts the formulaic language and visuals used in the copyright infringement warnings shown at the beginning of commercial videos with the logos of the companies that produce and distribute them. By juxtaposing the two, Muntadas links the in-home entertainment experience with the...