LADA Screens: Barflies 13 December 2018 - 25 January 2019
For December’s LADA Screens George Chakravarthi will present a single screen video of Barflies (2002). Originally a three-screen installation, the work which is performed by Chakravarthi offers representations of the different investments in femininities embodied by transvestites and cross-dressers, the pleasures, fears and dangers of being in public ‘en femme’ and the particular dialectic relationship they have with the heterosexual male.
About Barflies
The different styles of Maureen, Claire and Jasmine signify some of the variations found within feminine identities in the transvestite/cross-dressing communities. Barfliesalso highlights the specificity of TV/cross-dressers in relation to public, social spaces. Many women ‘born female’ do not feel comfortable alone in bars because of the threat of unwanted attention from heterosexual men. Being out in a social space such as a bar for most TV/cross-dressers is often celebrated as a triumph, where a mixture of fear and delight may be experienced through a public expression of one’s female self.
Recorded on telephone chat-lines, the soundtrack offers an intimate undercurrent to the unedited footage. Transvestites, transsexuals, cross-dressers and their seekers engage in conversations which interlace the private, confessional and sexual.
Barflies has been screened at Site Gallery (Sheffield, 2002), Tate Modern (London, 2006) and was screened most recently for LADA’s Just Like A Womanprogramme for the City of Women Festival (Slovenia, 2013).