ICA is closed from the 30 May – 3 June inclusive.
The Four Chambers project turns 10 and celebrates with a retrospective screening of their decade of genre-defining and defying pornographic work.
Blurring and dismissing the line between art and pornography, performer and director Vex Ashley will be in conversation with Christie Costello and the audience about the last 10 years of sex, art and the internet.
Sex, now more than ever, is political and politicised. Not only making work with explicit sex but to value its creative potential in a climate that demonises our sexual freedoms pushes back against the othering of our bodies and pleasures.
From a background in analogue photography, art school bullshit and digital sex online, the Four Chambers project was founded in 2013 to expand what porn can say, do and be. Headed by performer Vex Ashley and self-taught with an emphasis on collaborative DIY practices, the project remains deliberately ambiguous, rejecting labels for films and performers. Four Chambers has spearheaded a new wave of creators making contemporary pornographic work from a new perspective in an increasingly hostile online environment.
Four Chambers take over both cinemas and the bars for the night with visuals and physical ephemera from their archive, concluding with an afterparty celebration. With the potential to experience over 4 hours of films over the evening, Cinema 1 hosts a 95 minute cross chronological mixtape of the collective’s work with a post screening discussion and Q&A. Cinema 2 then plays a rolling reel of porn from the Four Chambers catalog to drop into at your leisure.
‘Well it’s really a privilege to produce work that provokes censorship. Although I don’t believe that is my intention…I do not invite censorship – rather controversy, confrontation and unravelling of submerged, denied, latent content. Volatile erotic, sexual denial underlies the self righteousness of our reactionary censors.’
– Carolee Schneemann
Film Programme
Cinema 1
Alchemy, Four Chambers 2014, 7 min.
Pitch, Four Chambers 2016, 8 min.
Red Shift, Four Chambers 2016, 10 min.
Human Botany, Four Chambers 2017, 4 min.
Atrophy Portraits II, Four Chambers 2019, 9 min.
Gloaming, Four Chambers 2017, 9 min.
Orgone Theory, Four Chambers 2019, 14 min.
Blood Milk, Four Chambers 2020, 10 min.
A Cyborg Manifesto, Four Chambers 2019, 5 min.
FUCKED, Four Chambers 2022, 15 min.
Four Chambers Hypercut, Four Chambers 2023, 5 min.
Programme runtime: 95 min.
Cinema 2
Supplicant, Four Chambers 2016, 10 min.
L’Appel du Vide, Four Chambers 2017, 14 min.
Forged Obscenities 1, Four Chambers 2018, 15 min.
Automaton, Four Chambers 2021, 16 min.
Maman 2, Four Chambers 2023, 19 min.
Hydra, Four Chambers 2019, 16 min.
Divine Rites 2, Four Chambers 2022, 14 min.
Archetype, Four Chambers 2019, 13 min.
Fuses, Four Chambers 2020, 8 min.
Programme runtime: 142 min.
All films are ad-free and 18+ unless otherwise stated, and start with a 10 min. curated selection of trailers.
Red Members gain unlimited access to all exhibitions, films, talks, performances and Cinema 3.
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no. 236848.