Anthology Film Archives

Film Screenings / Programs / Series

WITH WOMENS WORK & PIANO BURNING, 2021

March 12 – March 13

March 12-13, 2025

Anthology Film Archives & ISSUE Project Room present projections of work commissioned for ISSUE’s With Womens Work Series (2021), which engaged fifteen artists to create new works inspired by scores included in Womens Work, a magazine edited and self-published by Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood in NYC. Originally published in 1975, Womens Work sought to highlight the overlooked work of female artists working at the cusp of the visual arts, music, and performance, and is a collection of performance scores. In addition to Knowles and Lockwood, it included the work of Beth Anderson, Ruth Anderson, Jacki Apple, Barbara Benary, Sari Dienes, Nye Ffarrabas (Bici Forbes), Simone Forti, Wendy Greenberg, Heidi Von Gunden, Françoise Janicot, Christina Kubisch, Carol Law, Mary Lucier, Lisa Mikulchik, Ann Noël (Ann Williams), Pauline Oliveros, Takako Saito, Carolee Schneemann, Mieko Shiomi, Elaine Summers, Carole Weber, Julie Winter, and Marilyn Wood.

Throughout 2021, ISSUE Project Room’s With Womens Work presented artists who were asked to choose a score to interpret and respond to through their own artistic process. The Womens Work publication offers an invaluable counterpoint to the male avant-garde canon, evidencing a network of diverse artists relating their score-based practices to the feminist art movement of the 1970s that tended to focus on more traditional visual media. Womens Work was republished as a facsimile edition by Primary Information in 2019 edited by James Hoff and Irene Revell. As highlighted by Primary Information, the original editors of the magazine were and remain adamant that the works should be performed; that they not remain static as an artifact.

These works originally premiered online and were experienced in disparate home screen and sound system arrangements. Now, ISSUE and Anthology join forces for two evenings to present the works back-to-back in a cinematic environment, showcasing the varied compositional structures, cinematic orientations, and unique approaches to the “audiovisual” demands of our current age.

The video presentation concludes with a showing of renowned composer Annea Lockwood’s iconic Piano Transplants work: PIANO BURNING. Curated by Lawrence English and featuring a performance from composer and artist Vanessa Tomlinson, this iteration was created in partnership with Brisbane Festival 2021 and Room40 in Australia. In 1968, Lockwood originally set fire to an irreparable, upright piano on the banks of the River Thames in London. It was the first of her Piano Transplants, reconfiguring people’s relationship to one of the most iconic western instruments of our age.

ISSUE’s 2021 online presentation of Piano Transplants, all of which can be viewed in the organization’s online archive, ran in tandem with their 2021 Benefit event, which honored Annea Lockwood.

Each of the featured artists will perform new work at ISSUE’s 22 Boerum Pl. Brooklyn theater the week following (March 20-22). Each presentation is inspired by the artist’s respective With Womens Work digital commissions, and each event will also feature original Womens Work composers Annea Lockwood (who will participate in a panel conversation) and Beth Anderson (will lead a conversation/workshop).

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