She has inspired a generation of queer, feminist and avantgarde artists and filmmakers. Barbara Hammer, a highly prolific visual artist working primarily in film and video, has made over eighty films and videos in the past forty years. Galvanised by the second wave of feminism, Hammer soon became a pioneer of queer cinema. Although the subjects she addresses are astonishingly diverse, her innovative and playful approach to form is unchanging. Her work is about revealing, showing, expressing, uncovering that which has not been seen before. “I try to give voice and image to those who have been denied personal expression.” Her experimental films of the 1970s dealt with taboo subjects through performance, in the 1980s she used optical printing to explore perception and the fragility of 16mm film itself, and in the 1990s she began making documentaries about hidden aspects of queer history. Her documentaries tell the stories of people who have been excluded and relegated to the margins of history and are often essay films that are multilayered and engage audiences viscerally and intellectually with the goal of activating social change. Each decade has marked a new direction in her work as she continues her inward exploration with an unfailing radical sincerity to talk about sexuality, womanhood, illness, aging and mortality. Her film A HORSE IS NOT A METAPHOR won the 2009 TEDDY AWARD for Best Short Film, and her most recent GENERATIONS (made with Gina Carducci) celebrated its world premier at the MOMA in New York in 2010. Barbara Hammer, who will present the two films GENERATIONS and MAYA DEREN’S SINK at the Berlinale Forum Expanded this year, will talk about the evolution of her wide-ranging body of avant-garde films and on how she views her own creative trajectory.