Doors: 19:30

Start time: 20:00

In 1967, “Topless Cellist” was the headline that hit the news after musician and performance artist Charlotte Moorman was arrested for performing Nam June Paik’s Opera Sextronique while partially nude at The Film-Maker's Cinematheque in New York. This event marked the infamous peak of Moorman and Paik’s yearlong artistic collaboration, in which they explored entirely new avenues of contemporary music by introducing new media, as well as sex, to classical performance. Moorman, who had studied cello at the prestigious Juilliard School of Music, also became known in 1963 for spearheading the influential Annual Avant-Garde Festival of New York, which took place in a variety of locations throughout the city until 1980.

This program includes Nam June Paik‘s 1995 documentary “Topless Cellist” Charlotte Moorman (29 min), which Howard Weinberg released four years after Moorman’s death, as well as the only existing recording of Opera Sextronique (5:10 min), which was restaged again in 1967 shortly after Moorman’s arrest and filmed by video artist Jud Yalkut. It concludes with Paik’s 1977/79 Guadalcanal Requiem (28:33 min)—the artist’s most overtly political video work—which features Moorman in a haunting and surrealist performance intermixed with documentary footage.

With special thanks to Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York. This event is funded by Freie Universität Berlin.