Acting
Diamanda Galás is a Greek-American avant-garde dramatic soprano, composer, pianist, organist, performance artist, and painter.
A Harvard anthropologist is sent to Haiti to retrieve a strange powder that is said to have the power to bring human beings back from the dead. In his quest to find the miracle drug, the cynical scientist enters the rarely seen netherworld of walking zombies, blood rites and ancient curses. Based on the true life experiences of Wade Davis and filmed on location in Haiti, it's a frightening excursion into black magic and the supernatural.
AIDS victims and activists cope with hardship and society’s ignorance.
A family travels through Egypt in 6 months.
A 96 minute internet video collage made during a particularly disorientating time.
A conceptual live concert by Diamanda Galás, "Plague Mass" continues the themes of the suffering and misery of the infected found in her "Masque of the Red Death" trilogy.
Rare VHS tape of Diamanda Galás performing in 1993.
Second part of Brown's Air Cries 'Empty Water' trilogy.
Live performance of Diamanda Galas in 1985, released by Target Video. The performance, based on a poem by Charles Baudelaire, devotes itself to the emaraldine perversity of the life struggle in hell.
Since its inception, performance art provided a forum for those artists whose work challenges the dominant aesthetic and cultural status quo. In "Sphinxes Without Secrets", performers, curators and critics unravel the mysteries of performance art and ponder the world women confront today.
Galás is known for her arresting concert performances and has been seen in the Barbican Hall on several occasions. SPILL and the Barbican are proud to present this important film installation which deals with asylum institutionalisation, originally commissioned by New American Radio and the Waker Arts Center in Minneapolis (US). Witness several short performances over the space of twenty-seven minutes alternating extreme high-energy vocal work with absolute silence. These performances reflect the state of a patient subjected to torture through chemical or mechanical manipulation of the brain, kept in a confined space with periodically or randomly triggered bright light, heat, beatings or rapes. There is a high density of speech-sound over time which is often machine-like in its velocity. The work employs the atypical speech and vocal signal processing that Galás has been researching since 1979.
A documentary about a shocking case of HIV criminalization in Greece.
A video designed to challenge existing models of AIDS treatment in our society. Using a collage of elements as well as techniques from video and performance, the themes of mourning, urgency and healing are explored in a poetic and highly charged video. Got Away in the Dying Moments suggests natural alternatives to the current treatments and attitudes that constrain our hearts and minds with respect to the AIDS crisis.
This first feature by Amy Greenfield brings to the screen the story of the daughter of Oedipus in an emotionally relentless, visually stunning New Music Film Opera which challenges the conventions of narrative cinema to create a genre of its own. The 2500-year-old drama of the woman who defied the state to bury her brother is transformed through stark, ceaseless movement, haunting sounds and music (including themes from Glen Branca, David Van Tieghem, Elliot Sharp and Diamanda Galas) and words of outcry against our own world's injustice.