About the Uncensored Festival
Uncensored is a new three-day interdisciplinary festival on art at the intersection of pornography and activism in Hackney Wick in London, UK. It brings together more than 35 artists, sex practitioners and activists from the UK and abroad. The program consists of workshops, performances, talks, a party, a roundtable discussion, three film events (including two film premieres), as well as a mixed media exhibition and film screenings selected through an international open call.
Roundtable: Who’s Afraid of Porn?
Jennifer is very pleased to be invited to participate in the Uncensored Festival’s first panel about ethics, censorship, and feminism. The conversation will include: “What makes porn ‘bad’ or ‘good’? Is there a relationship between the content of porn films, their cinematic qualities and production and distribution processes? Can porn entirely replace sex education? Have discourses about the female/queer gaze created a ‘feminist porn’ genre at the expense of women working in the mainstream industry? Bringing together people working in porn, this roundtable will examine the links and the tensions between the ‘ethical’ and the mainstream porn industry and address some of the central questions regarding pornography nowadays -from its educational dimension and the responsibility it implies for porn creators, to the repercussions of reducing radical queer and feminist approaches to a matter of mere aesthetics.”
Roundtable guests
Jennifer Lyon Bell (Blue Artichoke Films)
Misha Mayfair
Amory Peart
Moderated by Clarissa Smith (Porn Studies)
About the roundtable guests
Clarissa Smith
Professor Clarissa Smith has established an international reputation for research centred on sexual media and representations. She is interested in the different kinds of pornography across different technologies; in how people access and engage with pornographic materials and with other forms of sexualised products. She is also intrigued by the constant demands for increasing regulation and censorship. Clarissa has written about the problems of legislating against pornography and criminalising the imagination. She has written about porn-star performances, the meanings of masochism in sexual storytelling, the idea of ‘authenticity’ in pornography, and how audiences speak about the sexual content they like. She is a founding co-editor of the journal Porn Studies.
Jennifer Lyon Bell
Jennifer Lyon Bell is the founder of the Amsterdam-based Blue Artichoke Films that create diverse fiction films, documentaries and experimental films, illuminating the riveting, intimate and sometimes delightfully awkward side of sex. Jennifer’s award-winning films have been screened at international festivals, cinemas and museums all over America, Europe, Japan and South America. Her body of work recently won the European Feminist Porn Award and her virtual reality 3D 360° immersive experience film Second Date was nominated for a VR award at the Raindance Film Festival at its world premiere and recently screened at the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. Jennifer’s newest film Adorn is an experimental erotic game in reverse and is currently premiering at festivals all over the world. (Note: Jennifer’s workshop ‘From Fantasy to Film: Design your Own Erotic Film’ is presented in UNCENSORED on Saturday 18 May.)
Websites:
https://blueartichokefilms.com
https://www.instagram.com/jenniferlyonbell/
Misha Mayfair
Misha Mayfair is a sex worker and artist involved in porn, art, and activism. Whilst still a student, she started a union for student sex workers at Goldsmiths since they were receiving little support or recognition. She has organised art shows for and by sex workers and has co-hosted the film festival Alien Sex Tapes in the last porn cinema of Paris, exhibiting ‘taboo’ porn and video art that is otherwise too risqué to screen. She tries to use her voice to speak out about sex work issues with the aim of humanising the ‘bad women’. Her own art practice deals with the psychology/psyche and physical process of being a ‘bad woman’. (Note: Misha also participates in the talk ‘Yes, but is it porn? In the outer reaches of sex: fetish and obscenity’, presented in UNCENSORED on Saturday 18 May.)
Amory Peart
Amory Peart was conceived in 1991 as a director of POUT! queer video magazine, making short films like Fridge, where a lesbian dominatrix sexually experiments with a gay man. He wrote and directed Butt Buddies (1996),a gay male “Trainspotting-style” porn feature which won a Sexual Freedom Award for Best Film, and based to which Amory also directed an eight-part adult series for Gay TV. The making of Butt Buddies was the subject of the Channel 4 documentary A Star is Porn. This was followed by Lick Daddy Suck Bear (1998), UK’s first bear film and Piccadilly Pickups (2000) starring Alexis Arquette as a self-sucking trans narcissist porn director who forces gay men to play lesbians in his films. Amory then presented and directed his own Channel 4 documentary series about sex and gender; Digital Sex (Sexual Freedom Award 2001) and Future Sex. Over the past ten years Amory has been writing and directing mainly for Television X (TVX). His soft and hard series – from trans and bi films to political satires such as The Iron Lady Garden, Hard BreXXXit, Gobblecocks and Life in Bras– are ‘queer heterosexual’ pastiches of contemporary films and TV, all starring porn celebrity Rebecca More. Amory won the SHAFTAS 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award. His next film, the porno horror Night of the Giving Head is in pre-production.
. ………………………..
Date & time
London: Sunday, 19 May, 2019 – 19.30-21.30
Location:
The Yard Theatre, Queen’s Yard, London E9 5EN
Tickets
…………………………
More information
