MATHILDE, MATHILDE

Mathilde ter Heijne

July 29 – October 5 2025, Tuesday to Sunday, 10 am to 5 pm,Thursday, 10 am to 7 pm

The second film programme accompanying the exhibition "Marta! Puppets, Pop & Poetry", films by the artists Mathilde ter Heijne and Gisèle Vienne will be shown.
In a series of video works, Mathilde ter Heijne deals with political, structural and physical violence in connection with power relations in society. Using life-size dummies, she recreated victim situations and scenes of violence. In the video ‘Mathilde, Mathilde’ (2000), she assembles soundtracks from films by François Truffaut, Jean-Claude Brisseau and Patrice Leconte, each of which deals with female characters named Mathilde and whose stories tell of unhappy love and suicide. There is a sense that the various fates are based on a common narrative that can be attributed to the body of the artist Mathilde ter Heijne.
In the central scene of the video, she throws a doll of herself off a bridge to break the filmic illusion and question the theme of dependency.

Mathilde ter Heijne (born 1969 in Strasbourg) is a Dutch video, conceptual and installation artist. She has been a professor of performance and time-based media at the Berlin University of the Arts since 2018. In her projects, she examines identity and gender relations in contemporary and past societies that differ from the patriarchal system. In her installations, performances, films and videos, she gives new context and presence to forgotten or ignored voices.