There Are No Others/Bight of the Twin (M+2017)

There Are No Others (2016)
Director: Amy Amos Gebhardt
Category: III
9 min, Digital, Australia

Shot in extreme slow motion, this majestic series of larger-than-life moving-image portraits features ascending and descending naked forms cascading against a celestial sky. Drawing on the well-established traditions of nude portraiture, the body is seen as a fluid form, free from the constraints of masculine and feminine binaries. The rhythmic entrancement is amplified by Oren Ambarchi’s sparse and unpredictable soundtrack, as well as the ever-changing cloudscape.

Amy Amos Gebhardt (Australian, b. 1976) has created award-winning works in drama, documentary and experimental film, while also exhibiting multi-channel video installations in galleries and museums. As someone who identifies as gender-fluid and non-conforming, Gebhardt views There Are No Others as an intensely personal work.

Bight of the Twin (2016)
Director: Hazel Hill McCarthy III
Category: IIA
55 min, English, French, and Fon with English subtitles, Digital, USA/Benin

In 1993, avant-garde performance artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and h/er late spouse Lady Jaye embarked on a series of radical cosmetic interventions that would lead to them becoming one almost-identical, gender-neutral – ‘pandrogynous’ – entity. Bight of the Twin captures P-Orridge’s 2014 visit to the annual Vodoun Twin Festival in Ouidah, Benin, a city known as the birthplace of voodoo, and which claims the highest birth rate of twins in the world. In Ouidah, P-Orridge takes part in a twin-fetish ritual that allows h/er to reconnect with Lady Jaye, h/er departed twin, in the immaterial realm.

Hazel Hill McCarthy III (American, b.1980) is a multimedia artist and filmmaker who has collaborated with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (British, b.1950) for the past decade. P-Orridge first found fame with the experimental music projects Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV in the 1970s and 1980s.