Strange Culture

2007 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

1:15:00 minutes

Lynn Hershman Leeson

location: San Francisco, California
year born: 1941
gender: female
nationality: American
home town: Cleveland, Ohio

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government. Through interviews, scripted acting, and illustrations, Hershman Leeson outlines the series of absurd events that led to New York state’s case against the former SFAI Associate Professor and artist Steve Kurtz. By closely following Kurtz’s story, Hershman Leeson reveals a strange ripple effect of the Bush administration’s destructive policies. Strange Culture discusses the dangerous reverberations of xenophobia splintering from the case against Professor Kurtz. Kurtz and his wife Hope Kurtz were preparing an exhibition on genetically modified food for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art when Hope died in her sleep of heart failure. Upon the arrival of the paramedics to Kurtz’ house, they noticed scientific paraphernalia as well as a flyer with Arabic writing. In Bush’s Post-9/11 America, this was enough to alert the F. B. I. to his case. Within hours, Mr. Kurtz quickly went from the shock of his wife’s sudden passing to finding himself suspected of bioterrorism and his home quarantined.


Lynn Hershman Leeson is a celebrated Bay Area artist and filmmaker internationally renowned for her pioneering use of new technologies to explore key social issues. Her prolific body of work spans over four decades: from her early conceptual and performance works where she constructed an ‘official’ civilian record for her alter ego Roberta Breitmore, to her more recent works that intersect with the field of science to explore themes of identity, privacy, surveillance and the complex relationship between humans and technology, and the real and the virtual world. Hershman Leeson also addresses these key themes through her filmmaking, which is highly idiosyncratic and socially engaged. A notable example is her acclaimed documentary !Women Art Revolution , which focuses on the Feminist movement in the USA.


Colors:



Lesbian Beds
© » KADIST

Tammy Rae Carland

2002

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Scene I am Cuba
© » KADIST

Felipe Dulzaides

2006

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Behold These Glorious Times!
© » KADIST

Trevor Paglen

2017

Trevor Paglen’s ongoing research focuses on artificial intelligence and machine vision, i.e...

9000 PIECES
© » KADIST

Euan Macdonald

2010

The video 9000 PIECES by Euan Macdonald was filmed at a musical instrument factory in Shanghai where 90 percent of the pianos that they manufacture are exported around the world, and only 10 percent are “finished” and can be labeled “Made in the US (or) Europe.” The video captures an intricate network of mechanisms as they interact with each other, their rhythmic movements resulting in an intense choreography and a cacophony of metallic sounds dramatized by Macdonald’s editing...

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Borrando la Frontera
© » KADIST

Ana Teresa Fernández

2011

The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico...

Frontier-Linear
© » KADIST

Doug Aitken

2009

The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...

let this be us
© » KADIST

Richard T. Walker

2012

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Fridge-Freezer
© » KADIST

Yoshua Okón

2015

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!Women Art Revolution
© » KADIST

Lynn Hershman Leeson

2010

Hershman Leeson’s documentary, Women Art Revolution (W...

Borrando la Frontera
© » KADIST

Ana Teresa Fernández

2011

The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico...

Frontier-Linear
© » KADIST

Doug Aitken

2009

The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...

Cathy (bed self-portrait)
© » KADIST

Catherine Opie

1987

Catherine Opie’s candid photograph Cathy (bed Self-portrait) (1987) shows the artist atop a bed wearing a negligee and a dildo; the latter is attached to a whip that she holds in her teeth...

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Météo des forêts
© » SLASH PARIS

Météo des forêts — La MABA — Exhibition — Slash Paris Login Newsletter Twitter Facebook Météo des forêts — La MABA — Exhibition — Slash Paris English Français Home Events Artists Venues Magazine Videos Back Météo des forêts Exhibition Film, installation, mixed media Upcoming Julien Prévieux et Virginie Yassef, L’Arbre, 2009 — Image : Élie Godard Film Super 8 transféré sur DVD — 7 min 18 — Ed 4 + 2 Courtesy des artistes Météo des forêts In about 1 month: January 18 → April 7, 2024 La MABA présente, du 18 janvier au 7 avril 2024, Météo des forêts : une exposition collective réunissant des travaux d’artistes de diverses générations travaillant différents médiums (dessin, photographie, vidéo, sculpture, installation…)...

Untitled
© » KADIST

Nick Mauss

2015

As in other Mauss’ works that often look unfinished, the drawings in Untitled seem ever at the phase of the sketch, his segments as if they may uproot and reorient themselves at any moment...

Looking Back reviewed in The Potrero View
© » PIER 24

Pier 24 Looking Back reviewed in The Potrero View - Pier 24 Looking Back reviewed in The Potrero View October 24, 2021 This month’s issue of The Potrero View featured a review of Looking Back by arts critic, Max Blue...

White Series
© » KADIST

Ha Tae-Bum

2010

Ha Tae-Bum’s “White” series, started in 2008, begins with photographic images from the mainstream media depicting sites of conflict or crisis...

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Undocumented Intervention
© » KADIST

Julio Cesar Morales

2006

Julio Cesar Morales’s watercolor drawings, Undocumented Intervention , show a variety of surprising hiding places assumed by people trying to cross into the United States without documentation...

Untitled
© » KADIST

Jedediah Caesar

2009

For Untitled, Caesar encased recycled objects such as scraps of plywood, paper or cloth in resin and then cut and reassembled the pieces into abstract forms...

Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants
© » KADIST

Paul McCarthy

2008

Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself...

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!Women Art Revolution
© » KADIST

Lynn Hershman Leeson

2010

Hershman Leeson’s documentary, Women Art Revolution (W...

Tania Libre
© » KADIST

Lynn Hershman Leeson

2016

Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...

VertiGhost
© » KADIST

Lynn Hershman Leeson

2017

Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco...

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Lynn Hershman Leeson
© » KADIST

Lynn Hershman Leeson Women Artists in KADIST’s and Videobrasil’s Collections An Online Video Exhibition streaming at videobrasil.online from September 27–November 28, 2021 From early on, the work of Lynn Hershman Leeson (1941, Cleveland, USA) anticipated the impact of technological developments on our lives and has explored how women’s identities are coded and decoded by them...

Lynn Hershman Leeson, The San Quentin Mural Project, 1976
© » KADIST

Established by Lynn Hershman Leeson in 1975 and active through 1978, The Floating Museum commissioned and exhibited temporary, site-specific art in public spaces, first in the San Francisco Bay Area and then more widely in the United States, Italy, and France...

Rhizome’s 7×7 Models a Deeper Collaboration Between Art and Science
© » OBSERVER

7×7 Models Deeper Collaboration Between Art and Science | Observer Ben Shirken (l.) and Reggie Watts at this year’s 7×7...

Pleasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh - 3
© » KADIST

Yang Zhenzhong

2012

Peasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh – 3 consists of a massage chair fixed to a wall...