Mathilde ter Heijne

Performing Change

Museum für Neue Kunst

8 November 2014 to 22 February 2015

Mathilde ter Heijne’s art investigates gender-specific phenomena in different cultures. She reflects historic developments and current trends and questions socio-cultural, political and economic connections. What shapes gender identity and how does this, in turn, shape society? What is regarded as normal and how can social structures be changed? By means of artistic transformation, of as well the past and the future, the exhibition explores various possibilities of modifying and dissolving gender roles and associated structures of power.

Ter Heijne has produced new works with a pronounced regional reference yet international basis for the Freiburg show: Woman to Go is a continuing series of post cards that links photographs of unknown women with the biographies of wellknown, but often forgotten women who lived between 1840 and 1920. This association creates scope with which to look at and interpret history anew.

The work Experimental Archeology transforms prehistoric finds into a modern-day context. Corporeality and gender are initially made blatantly obvious and ultimately transcended in this work.

The work It will be! engages with the roles of Freiburg residents from the most divergent cultural backgrounds and their connection with the handcraft sewing. The work came about in a communal project comprising a total of two hundred sewn individual items. The space created by the project within the exhibition will be utilised and designed during the course of the show by students from the Anthropology and Gender Studies Department of the University of Freiburg. Thus it will become a site for debate, exchange, individual narrative and networking. A monthly programme will provide more detail of respective events. Each of the works has come about in cooperation with the numerous partners of the museum. The aim is to recognise and tap into the potential for change by means of a communal, collective process.