New York Our Time - Vivienne Dick

New York Our Time is an intimate and reflective documentary that celebrates both the past and present of New York’s Lower East Side, as it was experienced by Dick after moving there in the late 1970s. In the film, Dick revisits former haunts and reconnects with a number of friends, many of whom continue to work as artists in the city despite rising rents and ongoing gentrification. The interviewees include photographer Nan Goldin and Alexis Adler, performer Lydia Lunch, visual artist Cynthia Sley, musician Pat Place, singer Felice Rosser, among others. A tribute to friendship, particularly women’s friendships, as well as to community, artistic resilience, and memory in a rapidly changing urban landscape.

The film is preceded by short-film Staten Island, directed by the artist in 1978.

The audience will be then invited to participate to the conversation between film director Vivienne Dick and Isobel Harbison, Irish art historian and senior lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. 

Staten Island (USA, 1978, 5’53’’, HD Video from Super-8mm) 

A low budget sci-fi short, where an androgynous alien, played by Pat Place, emerges from the sea to sift through rubbish on a beach. This film was originally intended to be part of a longer collaborative work to be made by a group of women called Les Guérilléres, after the radical feminist book of the same name by Monique Wittig.