Part I_ Expanded Paint Tools

Works in the Exhibition | Interview



Mathilde ter Heijne: The invisible Hero, 2005
Photo: courtesy Goetz Collection

Works in the Exhibition

The invisible Hero, 2005, single-channel video installation, 5'48"



Interview

Stephan Urbaschek: You once said that in terms of content your works relate to each other like dominoes. Did your work groups develop in this way right from the start?
Mathilde ter Heijne: I've been an artist for fifteen years, and started out designing rooms you could walk into. But since my first video Mathilde, Mathilde …, 2000, I've been doing works that originated in groups. The video itself came about rather by accident, because I came across the name 'Mathilde' in three films. And i's not a name you often hear. Or I'd never heard it in a film before that, which made me curious. So I looked the films up and found that they were not connected. But there was always the same story, the same sequence of events, the same ending, and I wondered what was going on there. So I thought, 'God, it's the name!' [laughs] And perhaps to conjure it up, I then recreated the last scene of the film. There are these three suicide scenes, the act of self-sacrifice. To be able to video the suicide scene, I had to use special-effect dummies, because of course I didn't fancy dying myself. And so I had a dummy made that looks like me. After the film had been recorded, the most interesting material turned out to be where the special effects show up recognisably.

Text excerpt »I'm the artist who blows herself up« - Telephone Interview with Mathilde ter Heijne, Munich-New York, May 2005 (Author: Stephan Urbaschek), Exhibition Catalogue Imagination Becomes Reality Part I_Expanded Paint Tools