"Men have landed on the moon but to many, I Am Curious (Yellow) will be the event of 1969." Such read the headlines appearing in American newspapers when the film, directed by Vilgot Sjöman, was seized by U.S. customs officials on the grounds that it was pornographic. A film about a radical student who engages in a public inquiry into the social, political and sexual questions relevant to Swedes at the time, I Am Curious (Yellow) unfolds in terms of recording devices, pads and pencils, posters, Cinéma vérité, interviews, and fiction film. According to Vincent Canby, a New York Times film critic at the time, I Am Curious (Yellow), together with Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966), "contributed to a mini-revolution in the commercial movie underground - that twilight industry made up of producers of sexploitation films."
Marta Kuzma takes as her point of departure Sjöman's I Am Curious (Yellow) and its censorship edict in the U.S. to explore how the ban against the film served as a door opener to the pornography industry in the United States. In doing so, "Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia?" reflects upon the international perception of Scandinavia at the time as a sexual Utopia and deconstructs the reasons behind the building of these representations with the aim of investigating their mythical status. The presentation includes excerpts from Torgny Wickman's Language of Love (1969) and Dusan Makavejev'sW.R. - Mysteries of the Organism (1971).
Freud's controversial pupil, Wilhelm Reich, lived in Norway from 1934 to 1939, a period when he wrote The Sexual Revolutionand launched psychoanalysis as an experimental laboratory science coining the concept of the "orgone". Remaining active politically as a Communist, Reich developed a community with other political dissidents in Norway, such as Jacob Walcher, Willy Brandt and Leon Trotsky. Taking modern science studies and the notion of the social construction of science as a starting point, Håvard Nilsen revisits the first public debate related to the experiments around sexual energy conducted in Norway, in order to argue that the political aspects were far more important than the scientific issues at stake in the debate, especially the so-called Trotsky affair at the beginning of the Moscow Trials.
[OCA, NYC] is an experimental platform launched by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway in Oslo to initiate projects, seminars, talks, screenings, and to host short-term residencies as an alternative and satellite space. [OCA, NYC] is physically lodged within the historical Cunard Cruise Lines building (and former Police Museum), adjacent to Battery Park and accessible via subway by the 4,5 at Bowling Green, the 1, R, W at Rector Street or the J, M, Z at Broad Street.
