Mathilde ter Heijne is a Dutch contemporary visual artist. Specific topics featured in her work include women marginalized in society, domestic and political
German artist work often challenges attributes that patriarchal social structures have assigned to men and women over the centuries. Film, Installation, Sound and ceramics through experimental archaeology.
AssEmbling Past and Future
The video installation Assembling Past and Future is part of the Blood, Sweat and Tears project. It was created in collaboration with a network of cultural- and peace activists, and transforms the exhibition space into a kind of virtual congress or assembly. The work blends historical images and text (including those from the First International Congress of Women at The Hague, 1915) with statements and portraits captured a full century later, effectively blurring the usual boundaries between protagonists, places and periods of time. This artistic strategy invokes different ways of grasping history while exploring new opportunities and possibilities for peaceful coexistence between various communities.
Blood, Sweat and Tears—Assembling Past and Future takes its historical cue from the First International Congress of Women at The Hague in 1915, where early female activists debated the sociopolitical, economic, and intellectual preconditions for lasting peace in the future. The projects’ collaborative approach probes the relationship between the participating individuals and conditions at the exhibition venue Galerie im Körnerpark in Berlin, which was transformed into a place for discussing and reflecting on crises, conflict resolution and peace.Blurring the boundaries between protagonists, places, and periods of time, the project enables a new understanding of history while looking to the future of activism and nonviolent resolution. It self-consciously shifts the line between art and activism, suspending the typical separation between reality, fiction and virtual space, but also past, present and future, community and the individual. Blood, Sweat and Tears—Assembling Past and Future is an artistic search for the shared essence common to everyone who is committed to a more peaceful world.
This interactive artwork is an ongoing project. Each postcard shows the portrait of an unknown woman who lived between 1839 (the beginning of photography with daguerreotypes) and the 1920s, while the “message” side of the card has text with the biography of a well-known woman who was influential or extraordinary in her time. The pictures and biographies were collected all over the world. The women with known biographies all fought for their individual goals in a world dominated by men – a world in which women had no right to choose or own property, and being remembered was an exclusively male privilege. Most of these women have been forgotten, and the many unknown women help us to remember those more well-known. Postcards can be taken free of charge, so the public can compile an alternative historiography with new individual biographies.