KOW and Galerie Jaqueline Martins are concurrently exhibiting in Berlin and São Paulo two pioneers of queer emancipation: Barbara Hammer, born in Hollywood in 1939, and Hudinilson Jr, born in São Paulo in 1957. Though Hammer’s movies have been acknowledged from the onset, her different creative works have solely obtained worldwide consideration within the 2010s, as has Hudinilson’s work. The exhibitions on the two galleries mark the primary time each artists could be seen collectively. 

Hudinilson Jr. grew up in São Paulo, Brazil underneath a army dictatorship and in a local weather of maximum homophobia. He was a member of the group 3NÓS3, with whom he created his earliest actions. Underneath cowl of darkness, he pulled plastic luggage over the heads of heroes’ monuments overlooking the city scene, denouncing the regime’s use of torture whereas additionally attacking distinguished public symbols of state (Ensacamentos /Baggings, 1979). Barbara Hammer might have confronted much less manifest hazard in comparatively liberal California, however she too, confronted the symbols of (male) energy. For instance, in Superdyke (1975), a bunch of lesbian activists storm San Francisco Metropolis Corridor.

It’s hanging to notice the similarities between the 2 artists. They each combatively put their very own our bodies and their homosexuality central of their artwork. Early pictures and works on paper that flank Hammer’s usually very specific experimental movies from the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties (just like the movie Sync Contact, 1981) visualize her personal erotic pleasure in addition to the wrestle for public recognition of feminine sensuality and lesbian identification as expressed in her drawing Darkish Vagina or Moon within the Head, (1969–71). 

Moreover pictures, collage strategies have been key to Hudinilson’s work. He was one of many first artists to make intensive use of the Xerox photocopier, actually mounting himself to the machine to make pictures of his physique—not out of an obsession with intercourse, as some critics might have implied, however in an act of self-scrutiny and a seek for visible constructions which may convey the sensuality and want of human pores and skin and flesh. See Narcisse, Exercício de me ver II / Train in Seeing Myself II and Untitled, each created in 1982. 

In some ways, their work had an influence that went far past their inventive output. When the AIDS epidemic broke out, each Hammer and Hudinilson took up the battle towards the demonization of homosexuals and emerged as vital voices of the homosexual and lesbian emancipation actions of their respective international locations. But, in contrast to Hammer, whose artwork continued to evolve and develop till her demise in 2019, Hudinilson steadily withdrew from public engagement; marginalized and boxed in by a conservative and nonetheless homophobic society and spurned by the artwork world and artwork market, he spent a few years as a recluse in his house earlier than passing away in 2013.

at Galeria Jaqueline Martins, São Paulo
till April 29, 2023