Community Action Center

2010
Made in collaboration with A.L. Steiner
SD single-channel video, color, sound, 71 min.

Installation view, Community Action Center, 2010, Horton Gallery, Berlin.

Community Action Center, is a single channel video work conceived and produced by A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner. This project is an archive of an inter-generational community built on collaboration, friendship, sex and art. The work reexamines how sex and sexuality is imaged and imagined for marginalized bodies—in particular for womxn, queers, trans and GNC peoples. Inspired by gay porn-romance-liberation films and feminist practices of the 70s’ and 80s’ the work opens with a recitation of Jack Smiths’ Normal Love. This video seeks to expose and reformulate paradigms that are typical of porn typologies by using tropes for their comical value, critical consideration and historical homage. Additionally a poster and zine were made to accompany the project.

Steiner and I worked with artists and performers who created infinitely complex gender and performance roles that are both real and fantastical, set to a sound track of music culled from the worldwide sisterhood: Chicks on Speed, Effi Briest, Electrelane, Chateau featuring K8 Hardy, Lesbians on Ecstasy, Light Asylum, MEN, Motherland, NGUZUNGUZU, I.U.D. (Lizzi Bougatsos & Sadie Laska), Kinski and Thee Majesty (Genesis P-Orridge), and featuring original compositions by Justin Bond, Nick Hallett & Sam Greenleaf Miller, Ashland Mines & Wu Tsang, Sergei Tcherepnin and Tri-State Area with A V Linton.