Mathilde ter Heijne

Mathilde ter Heijne (born 1969 in Strasbourg, France) is a Berlin-based Dutch video and installation artist and a professor of Visual Art, Performance, and Installation at Kunsthochschule Kassel. She works in a wide range of media such as installation, video, sculpture, and performance and incorporates elements from literature, film, and scientific research.

Through her work she explores the social, cultural, political, and economic backgrounds of gender-specific phenomena within different cultures and cultural history. Political, structural, and physical violence related to existing power structures in society are the starting points for a series of video works in which the artist represented different scenarios of violence and its victims exploring a variety of special effects including the use of life-sized dummies. Simultaneously, ter Heijne examined her own role as an artist and analyzed these particular structural conditions.

She is currently researching the fashioning of rituals and oral traditions as a way to preserve and share knowledge for social minorities. In these contexts, she explores alternative writing and symbol systems and considers the potential for matriarchal politics. She frequently works in collaboration with others, such as in the project "Give and Take" (2010) in which visitors were invited to take editions made by various artists and leave something of their own in exchange. Another project entitled "Olacak!" (2010) was developed during a residency period in Istanbul in collaboration with the Kartal Kadın Ürünleri Pazarı (Women’s Products Market) organized by the non-profit organization Foundation for the Support of Women’s Work (FSWW) in the district of Kartal. Ter Heijne is also a founding member of ƒƒ, an evolving and collaborative network of international feminist artists who have produced major projects in Vienna (2012) and Berlin (2013).

Ter Heijne studied in Maastricht at the Stadsakademie (1988-1992) and in Amsterdam at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (1992-1994).

Catalogues

Selected Solo Exhibitions

Selected Group Exhibitions

External links