Die Agentur der Dokumente: Listening Session on Yvonne Rainer
Narrative in the (Dis)Service of Identity: Fragments Toward a Performed Lecture Dealing with Menopause, Race, Gender, and Other Uneasy Bedfellows in the Cinematic Sheets. Or: How Do You Begin to Think of Yourself as a Lesbian—and White—When You Had Just About Gotten Used to the Idea of Being an ‘A-woman’ (1992)**
Wednesday, October 2
7pm (sharp), 6.30pm (doors open)


This 1992 Kunstverein München lecture by filmmaker and choreographer Yvonne Rainer is a fascinating document in many respects. In it, Rainer presents—“in a kind of performative nature,” as she notes in her introduction—a reflection along the lines of her own experience on the complexity of identity-forming processes and their connections to the medium of film. In Narrative in the (Dis)Service of Identity, the discursifization of the arts, a tendency coming from the US since the late 1980s, can also be felt: terms such as “situatedness,” “identity,” and “representation” as well as the interrelated troika of race, class, and gender, are used here as analytical tools setting off, as such, a career that continues to shape debates today. A recording of the lecture will be presented as Hörspiel (radio drama) in a listening session in the Archive Space of the Kunstverein. It will be broadcasted live over Radio80000. Produced by Jonas von Lenthe for the series Die Agentur der Dokumente (The Agency of the Documents).