Unexpected Pleasures: Women, Punk, and Experimental Film

Rachel Garfield is Professor in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art. Garfield exhibits and screens her films regularly (ICA in the London Short Film Festival 2023, Designathon 2023, Zurich, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin and The Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Hatton Gallery, Newcastle; Beaconsfield Gallery Vauxhall, London; Focal Point, London Short Film Festival and Open City Doc Festival and The Babylon Cinema Berlin, Espaciocentre, Tenerife Espacio De Les Artes, CCA Santa Fe, Arizona State University Museum, Aqua Art Fair Miami). Garfield also publishes extensively in journals and anthologies. She is co-editor of the monographs Dwoskino: The Gaze of Stephen Dwoskin (LUX, 2022) and Experimental Filmmaking and Punk: Feminist Audio-Visual Culture of the 1970s and 1980s (Bloomsbury, 2022), and has curated screenings at Metrograph New York (2022); e-flux Screening Room New York (2022), AEMI, Dublin (2022); BFI, London Experimenta (2022,2024); ICA London Short Film Festival (2022); Bristol Experimental Expanded Film (2018); Frankfurtfilmkollectiv (2013).

Peggy Ahwesh (b. 1954, Canonsburg, Pennsylvania) is a filmmaker and video artist who has produced one of the most heterogeneous bodies of work in the field of experimental media. A true bricoleur, she is recognized for employing a wide array of technologies such as Pixelvision, drone and heat-sensitive cameras, 16mm film, Machinima, improvized performance, scripted dialogue, synch-sound film, found footage, and digital animation. This range of narrative and documentary styles has offered her a sustained investigation of cultural identity and the role of the subject. Ahwesh’s retrospectives have been hosted by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Filmmuseum, Brussels; and the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Berwick-upon-Tweed, UK among other international institutions. She has taught Film and Electronic Art at Bard College, New York.

Betzy Bromberg has been making experimental 16mm films since 1976. She was Director of the Program in Film and Video at California Institute of the Arts (2002a-2019), and before that Bromberg spent many years as a camerawoman and supervisor for the production of optical effects in the Hollywood special effects industry, utilising skills honed in her astonishing kaleidoscopic experimental films. Her work often explores women’s psychic interiors and threats to an autonomous body through performance and raw collage techniques, provocative imagery, and humour, tautly woven together by evocative soundtracks. These deeply personal films touch on repressive social structures, American landscapes, ritual and intimacy. Her work has been shown at the Rotterdam, London, Edinburgh, Sundance and Vancouver Film Festivals as well as the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the San Francisco Cinematheque, the Harvard Film Archive (Cambridge), Anthology Film Archives (New York City), the National Film Theater (London), The Vootrum Centrum (Belgium), and the Centre Georges Pompidou (France). Alongside her filmmaking, Bromberg worked as a long-time optical effects supervisor to the film industry, on iconic Hollywood pictures including Tremors (Ron Underwood, 1990) Terminator II: Judgement Day (James Cameron, 1991), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992).

Abigail Child has been at the forefront of experimental writing and media since the 1980s, having completed more than thirty film/video works and installations, and written six books. An acknowledged pioneer in montage, Child addresses the interplay between sound and image, with cultural and urban displacements at the heart of her concerns. Child is the principal director, cinematographer, and editor on her films. Her work involves intimate collaborations, with poets: Monica de la Torre (To and No Fro), Gary Sullivan (Mirror World), Nada Gordon (Ligatures), and Adeena Karasick (Salomé); as well as with notable downtown composers including John Zorn (The Future Is Behind You), Ikue Mori (B/side, 8 Million), Zeena Parkins (Unbound, Mayhem), Christian Marclay (Mayhem, Surface Noise), and Andrea Parkins (Vis A Vis, Acts and Intermissions). Her films, compulsive visual and aural legerdemain, have been widely awarded and shown internationally. In 2020-2021 Child has completed her film Origin of the Species and currently is working on a feature experimental documentary on climate change on Nova Scotia’s South Shore working title: Precipice.

Vivienne Dick (b. 1950, Donegal) is an Irish feminist experimental and documentary filmmaker. She attended University College Dublin before moving to New York in the 1970s, where her early films helped define the No Wave cinema movement. She later became a member of the London Film-Makers’ Co-op. In 2014, the Irish Times called her “one of the most important filmmakers Ireland has produced.” Dick taught Film in GMIT Galway for many years and and was visiting faculty in many colleges including Goldsmith, L’École des hautes études Paris, Bergen Academy of Art & Design, Glasgow University, and The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. She has received a number of Production Awards from the Arts Council of Ireland and her work has shown extensively at festivals and museums in Europe. Dick has had retrospectives at Crawford, Cork (2009), Tate Modern, London (2010), and IMMA, Dublin (2017.) She is a member of Aosdana and has work in the collections of the Irish Film Archive, Anthology Archives, the BFI, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Tessa Hughes-Freeland has been working with film for many years and is considered a member of The Cinema of Transgression movement. Her films have screened internationally in museums, galleries and seedy bars, including MOMA, MOCA, The Whitney, The New Museum, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, La Cinematheque Francaise and Seoul Museum of Art. She has presented gallery installations in New York and Scandinavia. Hughes-Freeland has been a juror for several festivals, and has programmed extensively, most recently for Punk Lust: Radical Provocation 1971-85 at the Museum of Sex. She was also President of the Board of directors for the New York Film-makers Co-operative for several years.

Ruth Novaczek is an artist and curator. Her film, performance, and installation works explore diaspora, gender, humor, sexuality, cinematic language, and philosophy. Using found footage, aphorism, and live action the films are diasporic stand-up, feminist mash-ups, poetic, irreverent musings. She has been a DJ and played in bands, and applies an eclectic musical compositional element to her work. She received an Arts Council of England award for her film Philosopher Queen, and has had solo shows at the New York Kunsthalle; Arsenal, Berlin; and the BFI Southbank, London. Living and working in the UK, the US, and the Middle East, she has been a guest and visiting lecturer at art schools and universities in the UK, teaching film theory, world cinema, and film practice. Novaczek is currently working on an expanded film project and writing an experimental novel.​

Anne Robinson is a multidisciplinary visual artist. Her practice is mainly film-based, often collaborative: concerned with the perception and politics of time passing, queering technologies, and working speculatively with archives to listen to the past. The Hurrier (2021), Poor on the Roll (2021), Wakeful (2018) and Thrashing in the Static (2014) draw on archival documents to expand on hidden lives. Screenings include APT, CCA Glasgow, Whitechapel, and Southwark Park Galleries. Film/sound collaborations include percussionist Limpe Fuchs and Breathing Space; and The Hurrier as an expanded work included a broadside ballad, and a conversation/podcast with Feminist Library on art, class, and bodies. Robinson was a commissioned artist for Queer Times at GoMA in 2018; and as a former member of See Red Women’s Workshop, she co-wrote See Red: Feminist Posters 1974-1990 (2016). Several See Red works are in the exhibition Women in Revolt! at Tate Britain, 2023/24. Robinson teaches Fine Art at Middlesex University.