Exhibiting Susan Brockman for the first time in Europe, OFFSCREEN reveals this almost entirely unknown artist from the 1970s.

“Depot” (1974), one of the artist’s first 16 mm films, represents the beginning of Brockman’s relationship to the medium, which grew from an interest in camera obscura. In 1976 she wrote, “My film Depot is very much like looking into the private, contained spaces of one of these boxes, and I work on my films as sets within which something happens.” The short, black and white film shows a single perspective of the filmmaker dramatically holding a series of poses in the nude, sometimes occluded by smoke or shadow. The edit of nearly still images progresses along with a soundtrack including thunder, various farm animals, a train that arrives and departs, and a woman’s voice. Inspired by the dancer Ruth St. Denis, Brockman’s still body amongst a slightly moving tableaux appears disconnected from the everyday sounds, as if the world is happening around her, and all she can do is pose and wait. We seem to hear her thoughts when the whispering voice returns, “Who’s supposed to tell you what to do?” “Who’s supposed to tell you what to do?”

“Hothouse Flower” (1978) is a dream-like, visual narrative that includes significant performances by an all-female cast of artists including painter Marianna Scharn, filmmaker Geri Ashur, writer Eliba Levine, and jeweler designer Kazuko Oshima, as well as Brockman herself. It was filmed in locations central to artist communities in New York at the time, including the Chelsea Hotel and Tribeca. The film shows women at work: making images, writing, or using their bodies in contrast with visualizations of their subconscious, suggesting imagination and dreaming as part of their process.

“Depot” and “Hothouse Flower” were recently preserved by a grant from Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film & Television.

Brockman was a filmmaker, film editor and photographer active in New York City and East Hampton, NY from the 1960s–90s. She worked with a wide range of influential figures in the film and art worlds including Willem DeKooning, Robert Frank, Dan Graham, Sally Gross, Peter Hujar, Linda Rosenkrantz and Anita Thacher among others. She was also an active member of the feminist collective Women/Artist/Filmmakers. Brockman’s photographs and films are inviting yet enigmatic, melancholic yet playful. They capture something fundamental about film and photography and its primary ingredients of light, frame, illusion, and the pleasure of looking. In 2024 Soft Network presented the exhibition Contained Illusions: Experimental Films and Photography by Susan Brockman, 1965-1999 in New York.

Soft Network empowers contemporary artists and those working with artist estates and archives to imagine and implement new and sustainable legacy models. Their mission is to provide space for shared dialogue around this critical yet overlooked field and to redress exclusions in art history.

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