Artists Space, in partnership with the queer film series Dirty Looks, presents a new translation overseen by Bruce Benderson of the 1979 experimental documentary Race d’Ep! (previously screened in New York in the early 1980s as The Homosexual Century).

Made by the “father of queer theory” Guy Hocquenghem, in collaboration with radical filmmaker Lionel Soukaz, Race d’Ep! traces the confluence between the development of photography in the 19th Century, and subsequent representations of homosexual desire. The film was originally accompanied by the publication Race d’Ep!: Un Siecle D’Images de l’Homosexualite by Hocquenghem, and moves from the nudes of Baron von Gloeden and early sexology, to gay sexual liberation and cruising on the streets of Paris in the 1970s. Influenced by the writings of Michel Foucault on the history of sexuality, and reflecting the revolutionary queer activism of the Parisian movement Front Homosexuel D’Action Révolutionnaire, Race d’Ep! explicitly charts the visibility and representation of gay culture.

The screening will be introduced by a conversation between filmmaker Lionel Soukaz, and author and essayist Bruce Benderson.

More information about this very exciting event is here

$5 Entrance Donation
Members Free
Limited capacity, entrance on a first come, first served basis

Kokoro: The Art of Horiyoshi III

Courtyard Rooms, South Wing, Somerset House, London

Horiyoshi III, the internationally renowned tattoo artist currently has his first exhibition in London at the esteemed Somerset House.

Horiyoshi belongs to a royal line of horishi tattoo artists: those specialising in the traditional full-body tattoo called Irezumi. This exhibition studies his paintings on silk as well as displaying tattoo instruments and paint brushes.

Kokoro means ‘heart‘ and ‘feeling‘ in Japanese and through the paintings exhibited Horiyoshi III preserves traditional Japanese culture and mythology through incredibly beautiful silk paintings. Each painting shows typical Japanese images such as dragons, koi’s and white phoenix’s, but each one is depicted is varying sensitivity, intricacy and harshness depending on the story told. The diverse nature of each painting gives the exhibition an eclectic feel considering that most of the paintings are all the same size and repetitively placed beside one another. The varying brush strokes and colours used also add to this fantastic effect.

Having “vowed to never be lazy until the day I die”, he still tattoos six days a week after thirty years of practice. You can see a video of Horiyoshi III at work here which The Guardian recently made.

After meeting Ed Hardy (the exhibition opens with a quote from Hardy about Horiyoshi’s pioneering impact on tattoo culture and history) and becoming close friends, Horiyoshi started to use the electric needle alongside using traditional techniques and pioneered a new form of Japanese tattooing.

The exhibition is free and runs from now until until the 1st of June, it is open every day from 10.00-18.00. More information can be found here

Photos I took of some very beautiful folk tattoos on a recent trip to South West India.

All images by Reba Maybury

Six London artists will be interpreting their feelings and ideas into artwork after watching Werner Herzog’s latest documentary Into the Abyss. The documentary explores the death penalty in modern day America in a non biased and humanistic form.

The artwork will be showing from the 30th of March until the 3rd of April at the Protein gallery, Shoreditch, London.

More information here

Trying to explain exactly what Jim Shaw’s (a contributor to Sang Bleu 6) newest exhibition is about seemed a truly difficult task with out just quoting from the press release:

”For Jim Shaw’s exhibition at Metro Pictures the Los Angeles-based artist presents a large mural and 20 drawings comprising a comic book that center on his fictional religion Oism, a narrative Shaw has been developing for more than 20 years. The works draw on eccentric aspects of American history and quirky old imagery to illustrate part two of Shaw’s proposed, four-part Oist prog rock opera. Its story, told through the comic book, follows two small-time crooks as they break into the Museum of Oist History in Omaha. Seeking refuge from encroaching FBI agents the pair ducks into a 24-hour wig museum where a helpful curator hides them beneath wigs that inexplicably render them invisible and transport them to the ancient homeland of the religion’s founding deity O.”

The exhibition will run from tonight until April the 21st at Metro Pictures in New York

More information here

Considering that Fashion Week pretty much looks the same everywhere we haven’t described the whereabouts of each photograph taken by Maxime. Although he did take these in Paris, Copenhagen and Berlin.
http://www.maximeballesteros.com/

Japanese Experimental Films and Videos will be showing from the 19th of March until the 16th of April at APNews.

The Experimental Workshop (実験工房 Jikken kōbō) was a transdisciplinary collective of composers, visual artists, a lighting designer, a printer, and an engineer in the 1950s in Tokyo. They created events that took different experimental forms – ballets, poetry readings, contemporary music recitals and vinyl-listening sessions in art environments. They also produced the world‘s first diaporamas with magnetic tapes, which were called Autoslides. The Jikken kōbō members participated in two short films in the 1950s: Ginrin, a surrealist commercial for bicycles, created in collaboration with Toshio Matsumoto, and Kiné Calligraph, an abstract film inspired by the work of Norman McLaren. The collective‘s composers, such as Toru Takemistu, Kuniharu Akiyama, or Joji Yuasa, would later collaborate on numerous and diverse film projects, from Akira Kurosawa’s epics to the underground animes of Yoji Kuri.

More information here