A modestly sized cinema that screens a variety of film formats, including video art, often in conjunction with the current exhibition and/or contemporary events. The venue also serves as a platform for performances, readings and discussions.
Currently on view
MATHILDE, MATHILDE
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.
KERSTIN KRAUS
29 July until October 5 2025, Tuesday to Sunday, 10 am to 5 pmThursday, 10 am to 7 pm
The film ‘Kerstin Kraus’ (2024) by Gisèle Vienne is about Kerstin, played by actress and puppeteer Kerstin Daley-Baradel, and the ventriloquist's dummy Frankie. Two characters who, however, represent a woman - her name: Kerstin Kraus. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that Kerstin and Frankie have a sibling-like relationship: Frankie reflects an expanded existence of Kerstin. It also becomes clear that Kerstin is the daughter of a famous ventriloquist who travelled the world with Frankie. Kerstin herself secretly made paper dolls as a child - her father forbade her to make real dolls: they were too similar to dead bodies. Kerstin's complicated childhood is apparently responsible for her current dissociation, the split consciousness in which she appears locked up and lonely. Accompanied by atmospheric music, the entire film conveys a sense of eeriness. It is about questions of existence and death and about the portrait of a woman in which the complexity of the human psyche finds expression.2024, 11:37 min
Gisèle Vienne (born 1976 in Charleville-Mézières) is a French-Austrian choreographer, artist and theatre and film director. Vienne's productions draw on elements from dance and puppetry and thematise human trauma and social taboos. Since 2003, she has been creating an ‘ensemble’ of more than 100 life-size puppets. For Vienne, the figures are a sign of dissociation, the splitting off of pain from one's own body into something else that creates distance from traumatic experiences.