Much of Barbara Hammer's moving image work is concerned with reconfiguring lost histories, often of women, and bringing them to life again through experimental film. This pairing of Maya Deren's Sink (2011) and The Female Closet (1998) examines how cultural memory misrepresents or erases women's identities. They both reflect Hammer's interest in recovering the hidden or marginalised personal and creative histories of foundational female artists.

While very different in style, both films employ Hammer's signature non-linear, layered collage approach. They combine archival fragments, voices of contemporaries, and visual projections to collapse time and bridge past and present. Maya Deren’s Sink is a personal encounter with one artist and her legacy; Hammer literally and figuratively opens the door to Deren’s world, revisiting the spaces, images and memories surrounding her work and bringing her practice into the present.

The Female Closet expands that same act of recovery into a broader question about the structures through which women's artistic histories are preserved and remembered. The film (re)econtextualises the personal and social lives of lesbian artists alongside their photographs, collages and paintings, looking into how much of their histories can be traced through what is preserved.

This screening is part of Focus: Barbara Hammer, a program presenting films by American filmmaker and visual artist Barbara Hammer. See the full program here.