Fuses, Phantoms and Forgetting

The artist Carolee Schneemann, who fearlessly confronted taboos around sex and gender, died aged 79 in March 2019. We show her classic film Fuses alongside the work of two contemporary British artists also investigating issues of body, sexuality and identity.

Fuses, regi: Carolee Schneemann, USA 1969, 16mm, 25min. A: 15 år

Schneemann’s self-shot film remains a controversial classic…. The film unifies erotic energies within a domestic environment through cutting, superimposition and layering of abstract impressions scratched into the celluloid itself. Weaving images of sexual love with images of the sea, a cat, window-filtered light, Schneeman expresses sex without the self-consciousness of a spectacle. «…I wanted to see if the experience of what I saw would have any correspondence to what I felt – the intimacy of the lovemaking… And I wanted to put into that materiality of film the energies of the body…» – Carolee Schneemann

Phantom Rhapsody, regi: Sarah Pucill, Storbritannia 2010, 16mm, 19min. A: 15 år

Distinctive in its stark use of black and white and reminiscent of early silent cinema, this film is composed of a series of theatrical side-show «magic» acts. Three women Interchanging between the roles of magician, nude and filmmaker, stage tricks of appearance and disappearance, punctuated by trumpet, cello and drums. Phantom Rhapsody probes the notion of identity as surface that can be worn or shed and which can extend beyond the boundary of the skin, into the light in the room, the set and the props.

Forgetful Green, regi: Linder Sterling, Storbritannia 2010, Super 8 to digital, 23min. A: 15 år

Sterling a British graphic designer and punk icon known for her photography, radical feminist photomontage, and confrontational performance art. In this film a cast of memorable characters, including Linder herself, inhabit the film’s glaringly vivid surroundings, acting out as photographer Tim Walker describes «a display of human sexuality, lunacy and chaos».