With: Lene Markusen (filmmaker), Anne König (publisher Spector Books), Alexandra Köhring (art historian) and Ulrike Gerhardt (initiator of D’EST). Moderated by Achim Lengerer (Scriptings).

Screening and discussion on the occasion of Lene Markusen’s latest publication Sisters Alike. Female Identities in Post-Utopian, published by Spector Books and designed by HIT. On the basis of selected scenes, the filmmaker Lene Markusen will provide brief insights into the variety of images and themes that form her new artist book Sisters Alike. Female Identities in the Post-Utopian. Her everyday ethnological and cinematographic view of female subjectivities and lifestyles has been roaming through the last three decades since her first trip to St. Petersburg in 1993, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Drawings, scripts and excerpts from her films GRAD (2004) and Sankt – Female Identities in the Post-Utopian (2017) reflect the grave and conflicting transformations of female life, work and consumer worlds from a post-utopian, feminist and narratological perspective. Markusen connects images of crowded trolleybuses, mobile milk bars, quasi-sarcastic advertising posters (“nuts”), tired heroines and heros of history, utopian sculptures and architectures, imagined and thriving spa and beauty salons, travel agencies, stunning fashion designs, neo-romantic partnership opportunities, and late 2010s cosplay techniques, with surreal, daydream-like sequences. In here, the film’s protagonists, who are friends despite their noticeable differences, suddenly see their environment, culture, society and themselves in a new light.