Gallery TPW and Jacob Korczynski are pleased to announce two evenings of discussions/screenings/readings that consider feminist strategies in relation to the practices of critic Lucy Lippard and filmmaker Babette Mangolte during the late 1970s as part of his ongoing research within If I Can't Dance's Performance in Residence programme. Specifically Korczynski has been interested in Lippard’s interrogation of text and image in her novel I See/You Mean (1979), and the contemporaneous exploration of the subjective role of the camera in Mangolte’s film The Camera: Je or La Camera: I (1977).

His research began with a focus on the decade long evolution of feminist practices in experimental film and literature, beginning in 1970 with the first draft of Lippard's novel and the arrival of Mangolte in New York from Paris, and ending with the publication of I See/You Mean in 1979 and the release of The Camera: Je or La Camera I along with the production of related photo and installation work by Mangolte. This era coincides with a movement away from the formalist questions of sound and image advanced by 'structural film' practices, towards what critic Noel Carroll termed the 'new talkie': films that incorporated the social and political positions adopted by its makers while critically exploring the limitations and possibilities of narrative.

Within the context of Gallery TPW and its research and development period, Korczynski has been invited to continue and share his research with an invited group of colleagues, echoing the launch of his project that took place in Amsterdam in January of this year. Over the two consecutive evenings of October 29 and 30, we will come together to collectively read texts, watch films, discuss and further articulate the questions around Korczynski’s research. The films to be screened include Yvonne Rainer's Lives of Performers (1972), Ellie Epp's Trapline (1976), and Martha Haslanger's Syntax (1974), all of which will be presented in their original format of 16mm. The texts will include a collective reading of 'Theorizing Fiction Theory' co-authored by Barbara Godard, Daphne Marlatt, Kathy Mezei and Gail Scott, originally published in the Canadian feminist journal Tessera in 1986 and 'Notes on Reading of Avant-Garde Films: Trapline, Syntax' by Felix Thompson, originally published in British film journal Screen in 1979.