Chaperone with k8 Hardy

Freak Orlando, Ulrike Ottinger Filmproduction, 1981

Wednesday, July 15th, 7 pm

Freak Orlando

(Ulrike Ottinger ,1981)

EFA Project Space presents Chaperone, a weekly screening series consisting of films handpicked by a group of artists, all whose work provocatively explores disparate aspects of our culture’s love affair with mediated reality.

EFA Project Space welcomes the artist k8 Hardy, as she chaperones the film, Freak Orlando (1981):

“When I first watched Freak Orlando, directed by Ulrike Ottinger, I felt an urgent sense of connection with the film and her aesthetic, despite it being 20 years old. It blew my sense of time, political progress, and modern concerns wide open. The film was shockingly similar in its political and sexual politics to mine, and even more precisely, in a specific queer aesthetic that I thought had developed in the US Northwest in the mid-‘90s. It was like a surprise piece in a cultural puzzle that I had completed and boxed up. That box did not exist. The device of Ottinger’s film, a time-traveling liberated polysexual, is based on Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando. However, in Woolf’s novel, the safety of the bourgeoisie enables Orlando’s transformations and sexual deviance to be unthreatening and eccentric. On the other hand, Ottinger’s film unabashedly and unapologetically displays multitudes of sexual deviants with no prospect of normalcy. What I love about the film is that it doesn’t attempt to normalize or make the audience feel comfortable with these societal outcasts, but rather to display the pleasures of their queer freak lives. Furthermore, Ottinger gives no credence to reality or chronology, but rather has fantasy guide the locations of the film. In Freak Orlando, I really connected with the shameless portrayal of sexual and physical freaks and Ottinger’s lack of a need to justify or explain her characters. She reifies the notion that freaks do exist, and that they do not need to be contextualized or normalized. It’s a political sentiment that disturbs our current ideology of identities — that we are all the same and unique at once. Moreover, I was exhilarated to see a feminist legacy that did not righteously reject an indulgence in excess and the aesthetics of representation.”

Image courtesy the artist, k8 Hardy

K8 Hardy is a video and performance artist, political activist, and eccentric fashion stylist. A real Grrrl, she co-founded the queer and feminist art journal LTTR with Ulrike Müller, Emily Roysdon, and Ginger Brooks Takashi. Determined to challenge the mass media’s obliviousness to queer issues and alternative political action, she is set on the task of the abstract expression of sexual politics. One of her most famous pieces, a collaboration with Wynne Greenwood called New Report, was performed at the Tate Modern in 2007. Hardy’s work has shown in several group exhibitions domestically and abroad, recently including Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video at the Brookyn Museum (2009); Manifesto Marathon at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2008); The Way We Rhyme at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2008); Media Burn at the Tate Modern (2007); Uncertain States of America at the Moscow Biennial (2007); and Exile of the Imaginary at the Generali Foundation, Vienna (2007). She currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

EFA Project Space is located at 323 West 39 Street, 2nd Floor.

The Chaperone program has been organized by Ian Cooper, artist, and Michelle Levy, Program Director, EFA Project Space.

Sponsorship provided by

For more information on the event, contact projectspace@efanyc.org, or 212-563-5855 x 151