Miley Cyrus and Amalia Ulman Headline NYC Porn Film Festival — In Bushwick!

Miley Cyrus in Tongue Tied

New York’s first Porn Film Festival is coming to Bushwick, and top billing goes to Miley Cyrus, whose video Tongue Tied turns kink into pop in a way that only Cyrus could. The four-minute, black-and-white video, directed by Quentin Jones (which is also available on YouTube), shows her clad in black underwear, fishnets, paint, and tape, writhing for the camera against a moody backdrop. As Cyrus’s contribution might indicate, this festival, which opens February 27, offers decidedly arty fare in addition to the expected straight-up raunch.

“It’s a Pop take on S&M,” festival founder Simon Leahy told the New York Post about Cyrus’s video. “She’s starting to become more of a contemporary artist.” So we hear (see Miley Cyrus Takes Art Basel Thanks to Jeffrey Deitch).

But the inclusion of artist Amalia Ulman is the real surprise. Best known for her adopted Instagram persona that blurs the line between fiction and reality (see Meet Artist-cum-Instagram Star Amalia Ulman), Ulman has previously used racy photography to unpack notions of consumerism and female sexuality and identity. But she’s not exactly the first person we’d expect to see participating in a porn festival.

According to the festival website, her short film The Future Ahead is “a compelling and legitimate feminist reading of ‘Justin Bieberism’ and digitally-mediated sexuality in young fangirls.”

If that’s not quite dirty enough for you, there’s always one of the other top-billed acts: Tila Tequila: Backdoored and Squirting, a 20-minute video that we imagine doesn’t require much imagination.

Or, if you’re like us and prefer your exhibitionism to have an intellectual angle, check out Clayton Cubitt’s “Hysterical Literature” at MASS MoCA, which begs the question How Erotic Can Fine Art Get Before it Becomes Pornographic?

The New York City Porn Film Festival will run from February 27–March 1 at Secret Project Robot


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