Eliana Willis

For the inaugural show at its new space, Company Gallery has mounted the first solo show in New York dedicated to the feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer since her death in 2019. Titled “Tell me there is a lesbian forever…”, the show is curated by artist and filmmaker Tiona Nekkia McClodden, who delved deep into Hammer’s archive to gather videos, photos, and drawings from the first few decades of her practice starting in the late 1960s, when she came out as a lesbian, rode off on a motorcycle with a Super-8 camera, and started creating her experimental films, such as Dyketactics in 1974.
The exhibition, which also features a range of material from Hammer’s papers—love letters, diaristic poems, and her copy of an FBI report on mid-century lesbian rights group the Daughters of Bilitis—performs the labor of building queer community, forging affective bonds across time and across generations. McClodden’s insightful presentation of Hammer’s early work looks at a much beloved figure from new angles, insisting on its relevance for younger queer people.
Recently, we spoke to McClodden about Hammer’s 1972 BMW motorcycle, queer biography, and curating as a practice driven by desire.
The sole artwork of yours in the show is a 1972 BMW motorcycle that you had restored—the same model that Barbara drove in the 1970s. It seems this piece is the conceptual heart of the exhibition and speaks to so many of the themes that you’ve drawn out in Barbara’s work: biography, memory, sensuality, romanticism. How does the motorcycle reflect your own relationship with Barbara, both as a person and as an artist of an earlier generation?
Barbara Hammer, Haircut (1985) still. Courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery.
It’s really cool to be able to talk about this, because I don’t think people understand that Barbara and I didn’t have a long relationship. The first time I ever met her was in 2018, and by that time she was dying. Before that, going all the way back to 2002 in Atlanta when I was trying to be a filmmaker, I knew her work. 
I would go to Outwrite Bookstore, the LGBT coffee shop, and they had a section of lesbian magazines—Diva, Girlfriend. These magazines were how I knew that there were lesbian filmmakers at all and there were only a couple of filmmakers included like Barbara, Cheryl Dunye, Michelle Parkerson. But Barbara was special because she was experimental. 
When I was working on the show, the first thing that came to me was the bike. There was always one image of Barbara that stuck with me—a photo of her on the road in Baja, California where she’s wearing leather on that bike. I wanted the bike to kind of be this accountability partner, because it felt like something that was an extension of Barbara’s physical being, it had such an intimate interaction with her body. I decided to foreground this thing that is very physical, very sexy. I decided that I wanted it to be this mirror and to be reflective, something that would always catch what was around it. 
Installation view, “Barbara Hammer: Tell me there is a lesbian forever…” Courtesy of Company Gallery.
I see a real insistence on queer biography with the materials you’ve included—not in the traditional sense of lionizing the artist, but giving a sense of the intertwining of social circumstances, sexuality, and artistic practice. The earliest works you include are from the year that Barbara left her husband and came into her own as a lesbian, taking a motorcycle across the country. How did you seek to present her biography through these objects? 
Using the archival materials, I wanted to go into her head. I thought that was a good way to counter the hyper-sexualized narrative around her work. I selected these things that were actually very difficult texts. She’s dealing with her coming out but there’s also these repetitive,  manifesto-type poems where she’s stating: “This is what I want, this is what I want, this is what I want.” 
In these texts from her archive, she works out a lot of her anxieties around being perceived as this deviant type of person. And I felt very comfortable to include these personal, diaristic texts because Barbara was the one who prepared her archive before it was sent to the Beinecke Library at Yale.
Barbara Hammer, FBI Report, Daughters of Bilitis (1985). Courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery.
One of the things that I love is the way you’ve insisted on blurring the line between “art” and “ephemera” or between gallery and archive. For example, you’ve framed a copy that Barbara owned of the FBI report on the Daughters of Bilitis, or one of her transparencies. It seems you’re asking the viewer to really think hard about what is a work versus what isn’t. What was behind your decision to do this?
It comes from my own practice of looking at ideas around biomythography and rememory. As I was curating the show, I still wanted to hold true to my own interests. Here I am, this Black dyke, looking at this very white woman, so there has to be somewhere where I process this through my subjectivity and the things that I know that allow for a different read of a person. 
With Barbara’s show, I really wanted to deal with blurring the line between archive and art, because a lot of her practice deals with issues around documentary. There’s sometimes more fiction in it than people would believe. 
When it came to the Daughters of Bilitis FBI report, specifically, I immediately thought: “This is going in a frame.” Immediately, I thought about it as a work of art. I was thinking of it as part of the mission of her practice. The FBI report was just as real or as fictitious as some of the documentaries that she made.
Installation view, “Barbara Hammer: Tell me there is a lesbian forever…” Courtesy of Company Gallery.
In the exhibition text, you talk about Barbara’s love letters reaching you through the person you love. As a PhD candidate at Yale, your partner was able to visit the university library on your behalf when it was closed to the public during COVID. There is a picture in the vitrine downstairs of her hands sorting through the archive. Do you see curating as a labor that is laden with desire, that is defined by affective bonds?
I think, for me, it is because it has to be. I want to make sure that people understand that it’s an artist that’s curating this because curating, quite frankly, is somewhat of a violent position. It’s really about cutting. You could really twist somebody’s shit up. But curating is always about desire. Like when I did the Julius Eastman show at the Kitchen, it was almost to the point of a madness, but that was what that work required—it is obsessive. 
Barbara’s work had a more romantic disposition to it. Because of that, I depended on my fiance in a way that I had never before. I could have asked someone else at Yale to visit the archive for me, but I wanted her to do it and I said, “I need you to do it because I love you. It’s about this lesbian identity. I trust what you will find attractive in the archive.” 
The second day she went she told me that I should flag this really intense letter to Barbara from this woman named Corky that said, “Tell me there’s a lesbian forever.” She just bust out laughing because the letter was so intense, but I knew in that moment that it had to be the title of the show. 
And that photo of her hands in the archive became something that felt very true. That is the affect of this show, that kind of engagement with another woman. She cared for me in real time. That was a moment for me to deal with my love, in this way, where this woman was also dealing with her love in this letter.
Barbara Hammer, Hand Print “Lesbian” (1985). Courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery.
How does the show’s title speak to the ways that younger generations of queer people interpret, embrace, and/or reject elements of earlier communities?  Lesbian (as well as dyke) were words so important to Barbara’s practice and the period that she made work in, but they aren’t necessarily favored today. What is your own relationship to these terms? 
I’m a Black dyke. It’s a word that I’ve always returned to. I think that one of the things that Barbara and I have in common is that there have been some complicated situations in our respective lives and practices where there has been this forced antiquation of the idea of lesbian or dyke. I find that to be dangerous because it’s an identity that is always evolving. So my thing with the show was to show Barbara to be this woman who was constantly interrogating her identity. 
I wanted the show to attract an intergenerational crowd. There are older lesbians who have felt like they can’t come into certain spaces because they’ll be seen as antiquated by younger folks. Because I’m 40—I’m not too old yet and I’m also not that young—I felt like I could do this middle ground thing where there’s a place for everybody. And that revealed itself at the opening because so many people came from all over the spectrum of identity, age, everything. 
My goal has always been to figure out how to bridge the past with the present and show that it’s not a looking back, looking forward thing. It’s more looking side to side—and that’s really what this was about for me.
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The pyramids of Egypt have survived for 4,500 years, despite the more recent waves of tourists and camel-entrepreneurs encircling these magnificent feats of architecture. Now, for a brief three-week period, contemporary art will also share space on the Giza Plateau with a ring of 10 site-specific art projects in the exhibition, “Forever is Now”, curated by Simon Watson and organized by Art D’Égypte.
Art D’Égypte, founded in 2016 by the Alexandria-born French-Egyptian arts consultant Nadine Abdel Ghaffar, has a track record of inserting contemporary art into historic sites in Cairo and creating a dialogue between past and present. As Ghaffar explained just before the opening of the Giza exhibition: “Ancient Egypt and this civilization influenced the whole world and our message is a token of appreciation and a sign of hope.”
It took three years of negotiations with UNESCO, the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities and Tourism and several embassies to achieve her dream of installing contemporary works near the pyramids at Giza, the country’s most famous archaeological site. “For [authorities], it’s a site of antiquities, it’s heritage, but contemporary art is not appealing to them,” Ghaffar said. “We changed people’s mentality and now they actually say that the art makes these ancient walls speak.”
JR’s Greetings from Giza on opening day. Courtesy of the artist and Forever Is Now. Photo: MO4NETWORK.
On Thursday, October 21, the public had its first opportunity to test out whether contemporary art enhanced or detracted from the last remaining Seventh Wonder of the Ancient World. Rather than merely block the view—an impossibility given that the Great Pyramid is over 475 feet tall—these art works transform seeing into an experiment in interactivity. JR nailed it with Greetings from Giza, a billboard of a hand that seems to be removing the top of the pyramid when viewed from the proper angle, and visitors lined up to take photographs of the comical sight.
L.A. artist Gisela Colón (who recently participated in Frieze Sculpture in Regent’s Park) took a less ironic tack by placing Eternity Now (Parabolic Monolith Sirius Titanium—a 30-foot-long and 8-foot-high mound made of aerospace-grade carbon fiber—at the foot of the Sphinx. Resembling a rising sun, it reflected shades of gold as the light shifted over the course of a day. Colón, who grew up in Puerto Rico, worked with a Latinx-owned aerospace company to realize the sculpture, bringing a collaborative spirit to the project. “My team is over 150 people and all of us who took part in this are so proud. I get to contribute to a little part of 4,500 years of history and it is a conversation across time,” she said. “It’s about unifying the human race and how we are all globalized now, and artists can lead that conversation.”
Gisela Colón, Eternity Now (2021). Courtesy of the artist and Forever Is Now. Photo: MO4NETWORK.
The artist João Trevisan, a newcomer from Brazil, explored parallel colonialist histories with Body That Rises, a tower of wooden railroad ties, a possible crate for an imaginary obelisk, while Egyptian artist Sherin Guirguis invited visitors to push-pull the moving parts of her monument to feminism, Here Have I Returned.
Ai-Da, an artificial intelligence art-making robot created by British artist Aidan Meller, was temporarily detained in customs for fear that she could be used for spying, but she eventually made it to the opening. Other participating artists included Alexander Ponomarev (Ukraine), Lorenzo Quinn (Italy), Moataz Nasr (Egypt), Shuster and Moseley (UK), Stephen Cox (UK), and Sultan bin Fahad (Saudi Arabia).
Opening day at Forever Is Now.
“Honestly, I had to go to bat for certain artists, I would not take no for an answer,” said Simon Watson, an art advisor and independent curator who had a gallery in Manhattan’s SoHo district in the 1980s and is now based in Brazil and New York.
After visiting Egypt five years ago at the invitation of Cairo artist Ibrahim Ahmed, Watson was approached by Ghaffar about a year ago to help organize “Forever Is Now”, and he had to perform what he calls “a waltz between the artists and the bureaucrats.” He is thrilled with the results. The pyramids are massive and could have overshadowed the exhibition if not for Simon’s strong vision. “Now, the site is going to attract new audiences,” he said. “People will be asked to think about the themes there through a new lens.”
Planned during the pandemic, there were many challenges to this show. In addition to the bureaucratic tangle involved with staging contemporary art at a UNESCO World Heritage site, there was the issue of raising funds for the project. Art D’Égypte was supported by a long list of partners including the local sponsors EgyptAir, Afridi Bank, the Sawiris Foundation for Social Development, Abou Ghalib Motors and global shipping company DHL. Cooperation from the American, British and French embassies in Egypt was also essential, although it created additional hurdles around the selection of artists.
Many of the artists also had to raise their own funds for the fabrication and installation of their monumental sculptures, with Watson’s assistance. “Every year, we start a project without a budget, without knowing how we are going to finish, but I believe in the universe and the ‘fairy dust’ that helps us every time,” Ghaffar said. One downside is that this enormous endeavor will end on November 7, too short a run at such an incredible site.
Lorenzo Quinn, Together (2021). Courtesy of the artist and Forever Is Now. Photo: MO4NETWORK.
Ghaffar is something of force of nature, accomplishing a great deal with an all-women team in a country where inequality is pervasive. Recently awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France’s highest honor recognizing a significant contribution to the arts and literature, she is determined to change not only Egypt’s perception of women but also build an appreciation for its own contemporary art.
Part of Art D’Égypte’s mission and a sign of its success is its ability to bring contemporary artworks out into public spaces where tourists and pedestrians must see them. The company has previously worked with UNESCO on three previous projects: “Eternal Light: Something Old, Something New exhibition” at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo in 2017, “Nothing Vanishes, Everything Transforms” at the Manial Palace and Museum in 2018, and “Reimagined Narratives” on Al-Muizz Street in historic Cairo in 2019.
Opening just weeks before “Forever is Now”, Ghaffar also organized a series of temporary exhibitions in 12 empty shops and local cultural centers downtown to create the Cairo International Art District, funded mainly by Al-Ismaelia Real Estate Investment.
The city already has a vibrant contemporary art scene and there are several Egyptian artists who have strong international careers such as Youssef Nabil, Ghada Amer and street artist Ganzeer. But there are many more who deserve recognition, like Moataz Nasr and Sherin Guirguis, both featured in “Forever is Now”. Standing nearby the Great Pyramid, Ghaffar said of her most recent effort to draw more attention to Egypt’s potential as an arts hub: “We are showing the transcendence between our history and contemporary art, which I view as a lens to our society today.”
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For the first time in its ​​4,500-year history, the Great Pyramid of Giza—renowned as one of the most significant creations of the ancient world—is hosting a contemporary art show. 
“Forever Is Now” is the name of the exhibition, made up of large-scale artworks installed along a trail leading up to the world’s wonders. The highlight is a new steel-and-mesh sculpture by French artist JR: it depicts a giant hand holding a postcard of one of the pyramids that, when viewed from the right angle, creates the illusion that the top of the ancient structure has separated from and is levitating above its base.
​​Gisela Colón, Alexander Ponomarev, and Lorenzo Quinn are also among the 10 international artists participating in the show, which is open to the public from today through November 7, 2021. (The robot artist Ai-Da’s inclusion was nearly blocked by customs officials who feared she was a spy.)

With support from the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and UNESCO, “Forever Is Now” was organized by Art D’Égypte, a private firm that—per the company’s own description—aims to “preserve Egypt’s heritage and advance the international profile of modern and contemporary Egyptian art.” The exhibition marks the firm’s fourth annual installation at an Egyptian heritage site since 2017 (with the exception of 2020).
Nadine A. Ghaffar, founder of Art D’Égypte, called the exhibition a “token of hope for humanity and a humble tribute to a civilization that stands the test of time.
“Egyptian culture is a gift to humanity, and the purpose of this exhibition is to showcase these treasures in a dialogue with the contemporary on an international scale,” she said in a statement. “Ancient Egypt has influenced artists from around the world, and so we bring the world to Egypt and Egypt to the world through art.”

In an Instagram post, JR explained that he was invited to participate in the Egypt show following his wildly popular installation at the Louvre in 2016. With his new sculpture, titled Greetings from Giza, the artist is also dipping a toe into the world of NFTs for the first time. 
He cut the installation’s image file into 4,591 pieces—the approximate age of the pyramids—so that “each piece becomes one NFT,” he explained in a separate post. “The pieces are very similar to what my monumental installations look like from very close—black and white dots, a bit abstract—but then make sense when all assembled together.” 
The artist added that he has hidden “743 hieroglyph rarities,” each with a secret message, throughout the collection. Registration for the NFTs opened today on a dedicated website, where they will soon sell for what appears to be ​​$250 a pop.
In the meantime, see more images of the artworks in “Forever Is Now” below. 

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A 2018 exhibition on the pioneering spiritual abstractionist Hilma af Klint’s (1862–1944) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York essentially rewrote the art history books, recognizing the Swedish artist at long last as the inventor of abstraction. Now, her work is returning to the Upper East Side, where David Zwirner will unveil a recently discovered group of eight watercolors.
The exhibition features one of two copies of “The Tree of Knowledge,” a series of watercolors on paper the artist made between 1913 and 1915. Until recently, it was assumed that the Hilma af Klint Foundation owned the only copy of the works, but it turns out she made a second version for her friend Rudolf Steiner, founder of Anthroposophy, a spiritual and philosophical movement that inspired the artist.
When Steiner died in 1925, the artwork passed to Albert Steffen, his successor as president of the Anthroposophical Society, as well as a poet and painter. His foundation, the Albert Steffen Stiftung in Dornach, Switzerland, only recently realized it was sitting on a trove of af Klint’s work, which now belongs to a private collector.
“I am thrilled to be exhibiting ‘Tree of Knowledge’ by Hilma af Klint, which has such a fascinating history. This is the only major work that exists outside of the foundation’s collection,” Zwirner told Artnet News in an email. “The fact that she personally gave this set of watercolors to Rudolf Steiner, whose philosophical beliefs deeply influenced her, is remarkable.”
Hilma af Klint. As seen in Beyond the Visible, a film by Halina Dyrschka. Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber.
Af Klint began experimenting with abstract, symbolic paintings in 1906, years before similar innovations from more widely credited artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich. Her route to abstraction, of course, was not through the avant-garde art community, but through the spiritual and supernatural world.
Her work was forgotten for decades, in part due to specifications in her will that prevented it from being exhibited, as she believed society was not ready to understand her otherworldly vision.
That view may have been prescient, since af Klint’s work has only become wildly popular in recent years. Her show at the Guggenheim proved an unlikely blockbuster, attracting a record of over 600,000 visitors during its run in 2018 and 2019, and she inspired a 2020 documentary film, Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint.
Installation view, “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future.” Photo by David Heald, ©Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
The first part of a seven-volume catalogue raisonné for the artist came out in February, and af Klint is currently featured in “Women in Abstraction” at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (through February 27, 2022).
At Zwirner, the works will be available for sale to institutional buyers, price on request. Despite the artist’s growing fame, only 51 works have ever been offered at auction, with a top price of just 1,600,000 SEK ($165,825) set in 2019, according to the Artnet Price Database. The previous record of 220,000 SEK ($35,871) had stood since 1990, and only nine other works have topped four figures.
“Hilma af Klint: Tree of Knowledge” will be on view at David Zwirner, 34 East 69th Street, New York, November 3–December 18, 2021.
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