As a cinematic description, the term “transgressive” is ambiguous because it can mean the form, the content or, in a political context, the critical questioning of a heteronormative social or physical order.
In blowjob.gif, multimedia artist Mario Ashkar, an emphatically imperfect drag queen, moves to the music of the moon baby in a night of performative sexuality in Pittsburgh’s darkrooms. In maku, bodies – as bearers of meaning – are abstracted in pastel animations and subjected to all kinds of visual transformations. In YOU ARE BORING!, Vika Kirchenbauer ironically concerns herself with the consumability of images of deviant and transgressive bodies in the context of visual and economic theories, using performances against a black background. Tell Me When You Die, a lesbian lovers’ dialogue in the form of a sex-positive holiday movie, sensually protests against hetero-normative ideas of female vaginal sexuality, whereas Mad Ladders conveys the mystic visions of a faceless prophetess of destruction and transformation in a hallucinoid kaleidoscope of TV images of pop music. Sadness is an Evil Gas Inside of Me: The Age of Corn, a theatre-like narrative fragment in summer, set in prefabricated buildings of Berlin, creates an outlandish performance with a mix of weirdness, comedy and eating - with Vaginal Davis as narrator.
