Bounded Intimacy (2024)
Ayanna Dozier
Bounded Intimacy, Ayanna Dozier, USA, S8mm > digital, 6 min, 2024
Bounded Intimacy (part of the artist’s trilogy of Super 8mm shorts entitled “It’s Just Business, Baby”) examines the histories of various forms of body labour across the Chelsea and Tribeca districts that were renowned as sites for sex work, sex clubs, and illicit sexual activity. Bounded Intimacy explores the seduction of a nameless woman and the camera. The relationship between the two remains unknown and ambivalent as to whether or not the encounter is “authentic;” the nature of their relationship is irrelevant, as the camera captures the authenticity of the desire of the encounter between the two.
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally.
Program Partners
This film is co-presented with San Francisco Cinematheque.
Image credits: all artworks and stills courtesy the artist © Ayanna Dozier. Portrait courtesy ©Tahir Karmali.
About the artist
Ayanna Dozier (USA) is an artist and writer born in Riverside, California, in 1990. Her practice employs performance, experimental film, printmaking, and photography, using auto-fiction, surrealist, conceptual, and feminist methods to image narratives on transactional intimacy, sexual justice, and interpersonal trauma. She received an MA from New York University (2014) and a PhD in Art History and Communication Studies from McGill University (2020). Her films and artwork have been exhibited at festivals, museums, and galleries internationally, including Anthology Film Archives, CROSSROADS, Prismatic Ground, Open City Documentary Festival, Media City Film Festival, BRIC, Microscope Gallery, Block Museum, MoCA Arlington, Hauser & Wirth, PLATFORM Centre, and The Shed. Dozier was a 2024 Penumbra Workspace Resident, a 2022 Wave Hill Winter Workspace Resident, a 2018–2019 Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Studies Program, and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow from 2017–2022 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her films are also in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum. She has curated film programs for venues including the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and Bermuda Triangle in Brooklyn. She is the author of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope (2020) for Bloomsbury’s 33⅓ series, and is currently working on a narrative film examining the emotional interiority of dominatrices. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.