Community Action Center

2010
Made in collaboration with A.L. Steiner
SD single-channel video, color, sound, 71 min.

Installation view, Community Action Center, 2010, Horton Gallery, Berlin.

Community Action Center, is a single channel video work conceived and produced by A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner. This project is an archive of an inter-generational community built on collaboration, friendship, sex and art. The work reexamines how sex and sexuality is imaged and imagined for marginalized bodies—in particular for women,queers, trans and non-binary persons. Inspired by gay porn-romance-liberation films and feminist practices of the 70s’ and 80s’ the work opens with a recitation of Jack Smiths’ Normal Love. This video seeks to expose and reformulate paradigms that are typical of porn typologies by using tropes for their comical value, critical consideration and historical homage. Additionally a poster and zine were made to accompany the project.Steiner and Burns worked with artists and performers who created infinitely complex gender and performance roles that are both real and fantastical, set to a soundtrack of music culled from the worldwide sisterhood:Chicks on Speed, Effi Briest, Electrelane, Chateau featuringK8 Hardy, Lesbians on Ecstasy, Light Asylum, MEN,Motherland, NGUZUNGUZU, I.U.D. (Lizzi Bougatsos &Sadie Laska), Kinski and Thee Majesty (Genesis P-Orridge),and featuring original compositions by Justin Bond, Nick Hallett & Sam Greenleaf Miller, Ashland Mines & Wu Tsang, Sergei Tcherepnin and Tri-State Areawith A V Linton.Since the release of Community Action Center in 2010 it has screened internationally and been lauded internationally as a seminal work. It can be found in the collection ofthe Museum of Modern Art, NY and The Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin, Germany. The work was ranked no.20 in “The 25 Works of Art That Define the Contemporary Age” by the New York Times in 2019 as well as ranked no. 18 in “The 100 Works of Art That Defined the Decade” by Artnet in 2020.