Tickets £5 on door or you can buy them HERE
Doors 7:30pm
After the success of Homoccult & Other Esoterotica which premiered at MIX 2007 and went on to travel the world, this lineup of shorts is a second coming of satanic queers and psychedelic wild boys. This is a new set of magickal, sexually transgressive videos focusing on erotic ritual and performance. Here are more artists, spell-casters, wraiths and strays joining as part of the pact of Generation Hex, presenting videos dealing with sex, violence, the occult, magick, and other mystic esoterica. The title, Luminous Darkness, is from the first Cyclobe album (used with permission from Ossian Brown & Stephen Thrower). For extreme tastes.
TRANSMISSION
Dominic Johnson
2009, Uk, video, color, silent, 5 min.
In Dominic Johnson’s performance, Transmission, a body tests its thresholds, in rhythms that rise and fall like music, or crisis. His aesthetic is one of melancholy excess, heady longing, and camp spectacle. The video presents edited excerpts from the work, which began as a response to the lost works of Freddie Herko, who danced himself to death in 1964, out of a fifth-story window. Johnson has presented solo performances at festivals in the UK, France, Slovenia, Croatia and Austria, and in clubs in London and Rome. He collaborated with Ron Athey on Incorruptible Flesh (Perpetual Wound) in 2006-07. He is a lecturer in the School of English and Drama, at Queen Mary University of London, and has edited two books, on Franko B and Manuel Vason.
LUIGI & LUCA ARE STUCK
Luigi & Luca
2008, USA, video, B&W, sound, 4 min.
Some say that love is about developing, that it is a dynamic condition that ties two people together, but when we try to conserve the shape, misunderstanding the original feeling, love turns into something else, the knot becomes a trap, attraction becomes rejection. We are facing the disaster without even understanding why. Love doesn’t set us free but keeps us stuck in a dramatic spiral, where at the end all that you get is to kill who you love. We feel like a last century Mormon couple living isolated from reality, with no way to escape. There’s no redemption: we are stuck. Shot in San Francisco. Music by Seth Garrison.
NUGASE! PANIK MAHJONG
Lukas Beyeler
2003, Switzerland, video, color, sound, 5 min.
Beyeler’s work frequently takes the conceit of ‘entertainment’ and the found ‘structures’ of gaming and applies strategies of mirroring/twinning/pairing to subvert the normative, in the process creating heterotopic spaces for displaced desire. Referencing Japanese Manga, Anime, and Nugase (video games in which winning players are rewarded with short flashes of erotic imagery) Beyeler re-writes the rules by ‘gaming the system.’ In Nugase! Panik Mahjong frequent Beyeler collaborators Massimo & Pierce, a couple in real life, play against each other and are rewarded with images of their own shared love. Music made by Massimo & Pierce of Black Sun Productions (also known as the Anarcocks).
DOUWANNAFUNK?
Murphy Maxwell
2009, USA, video, color, sound, 5 min.
Video to music, marrying ritual magic with mundane terms by using simple puppetry and masks, dance and hardcore sex with psychedelic overtones. Try it on a friend.
I GOT NO STRINGS
Gio Black Peter
2009, USA, video, color, sound, 5 min.
There was madness, heartache, headaches, drunk rap, rapes, dumb teenage stripper babes, freshly showered and shaved from NY, London, Berlin, Paris , Italy, Tokyo & beyond. I Got No Strings is a kollection of videos documenting Gio Black Peter’s travels from here to there in 2007-2009 with the Black Peter Group.
I PROMISE YOU HEAVEN
JodyJock
2009, USA, video, color, sound, 3 min.
A video work by the founder of the cult queer online zine Prayers for Children. The video is an extension of a photographic series of self-portraits where the artist acts as a guide for young men in a moment of transition. The subjects are generally being killed or killing themselves, but the staged, campy display reinforces death as a metaphor.
FUCK ME
Grant Singer
2009, USA, video, color, sound, 3 min.
Merging logic, absurdity, and satire, this work recontextualizes the “sex tape.”
MEET MURDER MY ANGEL
Black Sun Productions
2004, Switzerland, video, color, sound, 9 min.
A short film by Massimo & Pierce, Carlotta Steinemann and Lukas Beyeler. With Massimo & Pierce, Ennio Nobili and Iris La Liner. A disturbing tale of sound and vision, surrounding the loss of Innocence: about crossing over the Threshold, about Desire and Despair. There is no way back from an Angel. Filmed at the legendary StrafBar and featuring Massimo & Pierce in their Ghost Boys personas. A love song for the Children of the Black Sun, a Testament and a Manifesto: THE KEY TO JOY IS DISOBEDIENCE.
BESTIARY
Lee Adams
2007/8, Uk/USA, video, color, sound, 5 min.
Bestiary was recorded during a live performance at the Cock in NYC in November 2007. The performance featured a giant white rabbit (a nocturnal creature, signifying the moon who dies every morning and is resurrected every evening) involved in a Hermetic act of self-sacrifice, referencing Yukio Mishima’s famous Seppuku (ritual disembowelment). The video footage, shot by Slava Mogutin, has been warped and twisted to create a grotesque, psychedelic, kaleidoscopic vision, a bestiary of monstrous imaginings dredged from the depths of the collective unconscious using a process inspired by British occultist, artist and father of Chaos Magic Austin Osman Spare. The soundtrack “It’s in My Blood” by Coil is used with the kind permission of Peter Christopherson.
THE INABILITY TO BE LOOKED AT AND THE HORROR OF NOTHING TO SEE
Zackary Drucker
2009, USA, video, color, sound, 18 min.
Based on a live performance that took place at Steve Turner Contemporary in Los Angeles. The piece takes form as a group meditation: viewers are directed, by a disembodied voice, through a series of breathing exercises, new-age visions, and dysphoric confessions, all the while being instructed to pluck out the hair from the androgynous, stripped body of the artist, which is positioned in the center of the room.