MIX NYC: Multi-media installation by Sophia Glass & Erica Kermani

Untitled by Sophia Glass and Erica Kermani, 2013

November 12 – 17 2013 MIX NYC presents the 26th New York Queer Experimental Film Festival. The queer arts programme of the film festival features a series of video installations, which includes:

Untitled
Sophia Glass & Erica Kermani
2013, USA, plaster and multi-projected video, color, sound, 5 min. (loop)

The description of the video installation by Sopia Glass at YouTube: “This project explores cat-calls, harassment and other unwanted attention on the street. For many, these objectifying, and sometimes frightening, comments and behaviors persist throughout the day. The consistency of street harassment operates as a constant reminder of the tenuousness of claiming ownership over one’s own body.

We are two queer women-identified people who have overlapping as well as different identities. We chose to use the visual signifier of mouths (our own), recognizing that a legibly “female” mouth holds deep cultural significance, a commodified marker for sexuality that is coded feminine. It is also the vehicle for the most obvious form of human communication: speech. Here, the mouths are removed from the context of the face, representing the feeling of disembodiment that comes from being made a stranger’s object. The relationships are multiple: the mouths that are in dialogue with each other, and the tensions of the colorful speaking mouths being projected onto the lifeless colorless mouths.

Confronting a harasser on the street can feel like an endangerment of personal safety, when comments turn into threats of violence. We are occupying the position of both the harasser and the harassed, positioning the mouths and the viewer as both caller and called upon.”