LUX » Events » Screening/Talk » Criminal Queers

Criminal Queers

6 December, 2017

– 6 December, 2017

7.30pm

DIY Space for London

To coincide with Cinenova’s exhibition Time and Time again: Cinenova and Women & The Law Collective at LUX, we are excited to announce that there will be a screening of Criminal Queers at DIY Space for London.
Criminal Queers – Eric A. Stanley and Chris E. Vargas (USA, 2015, 63 min) visualises a radical trans/queer struggle against the prison industrial complex and toward a world without walls. Remembering that prison breaks are both a theoretical and material practice of freedom, this film imagines what spaces might be opened up if crowbars, wigs, and metal files become tools for transformation.

This event is part of the exhibition Time and Time Again: Women & the Law Collective curated by Cinenova.
Open 19 Nov–16 Dec / Wed–Sat, 12–4pm. More information on the Cinenova website here.

Chris E. Vargas is a video maker & interdisciplinary artist currently based in Bellingham, WA whose work deploys humor and performance in conjunction with mainstream idioms to explore the complex ways that queer and trans people negotiate spaces for themselves within historical & institutional memory and popular culture.

Eric A. Stanley is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Along with Chris Vargas, Eric directed the films Homotopia (2006) and Criminal Queers (2016). A coeditor of the anthology Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2011) which won the Prevention for a Safe Society award and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.

Cinenova was founded in 1991 following the merger of two feminist film and video distributors, Circles and Cinema of Women. Each was formed in the early 1980s in response to the lack of recognition of women in the history of the moving image. Both organisations, although initially self-organised and unfunded, aimed to provide the means to support the production and distribution of women’s work in this area, and played critical roles in the creation of an independent and radical media.
Cinenova currently distributes over 500 titles that include experimental film, narrative feature films, artists’ film and video, documentary and educational videos made from the 1920s to the present. Cinenova holds a large collection of paper materials, books and posters related to works it distributes, and the history and politics of film and video production. The thematics in the work at Cinenova include oppositional histories, postcolonial struggles, domestic and care work, representation of gender and sexuality, and importantly, the relations and alliances between these different struggles. The Cinenova working group runs a monthly programme titled Now Showing. The series intends to materialise relationships between contemporary artist moving image practice and the feminist and organising legacies present in the Cinenova collection.
www.cinenova.org