Mathilde ter Heijne, Untitled, from "Domestication", 2005. Deutsche Bank Collection. © Mathilde ter Heijne and ARNDT, Berlin
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Mathilde ter Heijne, Untitled, from "Domestication", 2005. Deutsche Bank Collection. © Mathilde ter Heijne and ARNDT, Berlin
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Mathilde ter Heijne, Untitled, from "Domestication", 2005. Deutsche Bank Collection. © Mathilde ter Heijne and ARNDT, Berlin
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Mathilde ter Heijne, Untitled, from "Domestication", 2005. Deutsche Bank Collection. © Mathilde ter Heijne and ARNDT, Berlin
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Mathilde ter Heijne, Woman to Go, 2003–. Offset prints on postcards and metal rack. Installation shot „It's Time for Action“, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich. © Mathilde ter Heijne
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Mathilde ter Heijne, Woman to Go, 2003–. Deutsche Bank Collection. © Mathilde ter Heijne. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer
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Mathilde ter Heijne, Woman to Go, 2003–. Deutsche Bank Collection. © Mathilde ter Heijne. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer
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Mathilde ter Heijne, from the series "Solving the problem“, 2001. Deutsche Bank Collection. © Mathilde ter Heijne. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer
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Mathilde ter Heijne, Lament, 2010. Video still. © Mathilde ter Heijne
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Mathilde ter Heijne, Moon Rituals, 2006/07. Video still. © Mathilde ter Heijne
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Mathilde ter Heijne, Experimental Archeology, 2006. Installation view, Galerie Arndt&Partner, Berlin. Photo: Bernd Borchard
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Mathilde ter Heijne, Export Matriarchy, 2007. Installation shot, „Any Day Now“, Kunsthalle Nürnberg. Photo: Annette Kradish
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Mathilde ter Heijne, Export Matriarchy, 2007. Installation shot, „Any Day Now“, Kunsthalle Nürnberg. Photo: Annette Kradish
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I am surprised when Mathilde ter Heijne
tells me with a hint of apology that she’s been living the classic
family model of a relationship with children for years now. It’s a grey
summer morning. We’re sitting in a café in Prenzlauer Berg; sitting
next to us is the actor Jürgen Vogel
with his girlfriend and child. Outside, on the street, is the usual
scene: young creative people, Croozer buggies. On the way to the studio
ter Heijne talks about how the rents are going up here, and that the
area’s original inhabitants are being pushed out. Everywhere you look
there are shops for interior decorating, high-end children’s clothing,
and organic food popping up where coal suppliers and workshops used to
be. A rent increase means that ter Heijne will also soon have to move
out of her studio in a factory courtyard where an ever-growing number
of artists and galleries have settled over the past several years.
Sitting in the café, we talk about the catastrophic situation in Greece
and the repercussions of the financial crisis. About how she came to
Berlin from Holland 13 years ago; how dynamic the city was in both an
intellectual and artistic sense, and how stagnant it is now. According
to ter Heijne, what the city particularly lacks these days are real
alternatives and divergent ways of life. The cozy, secure world of
Prenzlauer Berg also gives off this feeling; it’s the very paragon of a
monoculture in which alternative and bourgeois leanings merge in the
form of the modern nuclear family. The idyllic life presented, however,
is a pale surrogate that would be unthinkable without the feminist,
squatter, civil rights, and environmental movements of the past
decades. Despite this, Prenzlauer Berg doesn’t even partially live up
to the promises it makes for an equal opportunity, alternative form of
co-existence. In view of the urgent social and ecological problems
pressing upon us all, it comes across as a high-priced protected zone.
Something fundamental has to change, but how? Does feminism also mean
class warfare? Right from the beginning of our conversation, Ter Heijne
expresses the doubts occupying her—doubts as to whether a feminist
artist can assume a political stance and really have an effect on
something—in the art establishment, in life, in relationships. When,
over a glass of chai latte, she says that she loves “extreme
experiences” and likes to teeter on the “razor’s edge,” it sounds a
little like an announcement of lifestyle at first. But her art really
does aim at what really hurts—the mechanisms of oppressing women,
domestic violence, marginalization, and self-sacrifice that lie hidden
behind the facades of purportedly enlightened or intact family
relationships.
Tellingly, it is a dollhouse that breaks apart in ter Heijne’s photo series Domestication (2005)—or more precisely a miniature copy of Jan Vermeer’s house in Delft. Domestication is one of the works from the Deutsche Bank Collection on view on the floor featuring ter Heijne’s work in the Frankfurt Head Office. The series was made in the framework of the video project Fuck Patriarchy!
(2004). In both works, the house is a decorative prison that physically
constricts women to the point that they could burst it apart and nearly
perish because of it. In her video, ter Heijne pairs Vermeer’s idylls
with scenes and dialogues of domestic violence: kitchen chairs knocked
over, broken dishes. The scenes and dialogues are either found footage
taken from films or were produced together with a Dutch theater company
that also performs in women’s shelters. “They work out ways to escape
the cycle of violence,” explains ter Heijne, “to free oneself from this
notion that that’s how things are and that they can’t be different.
This is where interactive theater in women’s shelters comes in. A
scene, a violent conflict is replayed. And then you say, OK, if you do
it that way then you’ll remain stuck in this circle. If you try it like
this, though, then you’ll see that you’re acting differently.”
But why would you place contemporary domestic violence in a
17th-century setting, of all things? “Nowhere else in the world was
there so much accumulation of wealth and property,” says ter Heijne.
“The Netherlands, with its rich traders, became a bastion of the
bourgeoisie. But along with the rise of the bourgeoisie, the wife’s
body was declared to be property, while laws were passed that permitted
men to ‘castigate’ her violently. She was no longer allowed to appear
in public without his permission. Vermeer doesn’t portray reality, but
rather an idealized state of the bourgeoisie that people of the time
would have liked to see: the woman sitting at home peacefully, with
music. But those were women that were silenced. They seem like
furniture in an idyllic scene. Recorded history tells us that a
majority of them suffered tremendously, that it was anything but a
golden age for them—on the contrary, it was the beginning of a new form
of the patriarchal era in which we still live today.”
Then ter Heijne talks about a contemporary of Vermeer’s that also inspired her to make Fuck Patriarchy! In her copper engravings, Geertruyd Roghman
(1602-1657) depicts harsh, unembellished everyday life: hardworking
women in working clothes, bent over spinning wheels and sinks, sewing
and weaving baskets. These images are so precise that they serve as
sources for the reconstruction of historical kitchens to this day.
Geertruyd Roghman knew what she portrayed in her pictures. To ter
Heijne’s mind, the fact that she is almost completely forgotten
alongside a master like Vermeer is not only due to his virtuosity, but
actually follows the logic of deliberate suppression of female history,
female biographies and living realities—because patriarchal dominance
doesn’t only occur in the home environment, but also in the recording
of history.
The project Woman to Go, which
ter Hejine began in 2005 and continues to work on in various forms, is
dedicated to forgotten biographies such as these. The idea behind the
installations, of which the most recent version is presented in
Deutsche Bank’s new Amsterdam offices, seems at first rather simple:
hundreds of postcards stacked in wall racks are offered for the taking,
free of charge. On the front of the cards are photographs of unknown
women taken between 1839 and 1920. On the backs are biographies from
this era, which obviously, however, are unconnected to the photographs.
A basic idea in the work is that the effect exerted by the portraits
and biographies is heightened by this very discrepancy. Frequently,
these biographies chart the adventurous lives of unusual women all over
the world—artists, tea traders, pirates, writers, researchers,
partisans, suffragettes. All of them were pioneers whose achievements
were overlooked by the “official” version of history. On her journeys
around the globe, for years ter Heijne pored through used book stores
and flea markets, researched with students in archives, searched the
Internet. “In China, for example, there are hardly any women’s
biographies from this time at all. I said to them, but that can’t be,
did you really look hard enough? And it turned out that there really
weren’t any biographies from this time, except for a small number of
concubines and empresses. That’s where it ends. Up until only around a
century ago, women there had no name, no status, and were completely
marginalized—as if they were livestock.”
By bringing together a variety of different women’s fates, ter Heijne
has created an interactive archive. Each of the postcards a visitor
takes home offers a chance to remember these female role models and
become inspired by them. Woman to Go,
says ter Heijne, “is about the relationship between impotence and
power, the idea of the one-sidedness of history, the fact that history
is perceived from the perspective of a unilateral image of the world
whose reality one can, however, change.” Tattooed Inuit women, beauties of the Belle Époque,
farmers, African and Japanese women in traditional folk costumes: one
can see how multi-faceted these realities were by the clothing styles,
bodily postures, and poses. And then there are these gazes looking off
into the distance, helpless or seductive smiles, folded hands, faces
that speak of either pride or humiliation—each of these often spotty,
pale photographs gives an idea of what was never passed on or
documented, of what has been irrevocably lost.
“That’s what characterizes this work,” says ter Heijne. “What can be
found, what can’t be found? What does it say about the different
countries, the different biological and geographical backgrounds? One
could say that it’s about history being ‘invented’ or ‘found again.’ Of
course it’s not only about women and men, but also about black and
white. I see these women’s stories as a metaphor for everything that
has been marginalized by this patriarchal, colonized view of the world.
You should become familiar with the feminist agenda even if you’re not
a woman. I’m not saying that the patriarchy only consists of men—that
would be too easy. These are systems of thought and power.”
During the course of her research on the patriarchy, she traveled the
whole world, visited indigenous peoples, searched for alternative
economic, social, and writing systems. Ter Heijne made numerous works
about various different forms of matriarchal culture. Her video Lament (2010) was made during a workshop with Finnish wailing women who carry on an ancient shamanistic tradition. In Moon Rituals
(2007), a group of women sets handmade goddess figures on fire during
two full moon rituals. These reconstructions of prehistoric artifacts
were made according to illustrations from Marija Gimbuta’s book The Language of the Goddess
(1989), which attempts to prove how the forgotten and repressed
language of the goddesses has left its mark on our entire Western
culture. Ter Heijne exhibited these clay sculptures under the title Experimental Archeology (2006/07).
To ter Heijne’s mind, this view of thousand-year-old cultures is an
approach to a radically different type of thinking that lies buried
deep in the past: “in matriarchal societies, the overall world picture
is completely different. As functioning social systems, they have
existed for a very long time. On the other hand, socialism and
communism are completely recent projects. The matriarchy was lived for
thousands of years in indigenous societies. I found it very interesting
to research these other social, political, and economic foundations.
Actually, Friedrich Engels developed his theses for The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staates,
1884) out of his research on matriarchal structures. Much of it has
become marginalized because of its enormous explosive potential.”
During the course of her project Export Matriarchy (2007), ter Heijne visited the Mosuo
tribe in Southwest China. As a minority, they live in a matriarchal
social order that comes to expression in the clan’s central meeting
place, the Zumu wooden house. Life together is governed by the family
matriarch; there is no personal property, and money is shared among the
family’s members. For the Mosuo, it’s more important to have daughters,
because they carry on the clan. They do not, however, marry. When girls
turn 13, they are given the key to their own room in a solemn
initiation ritual where they can receive visits from their friends
whenever they want. Boys do not have their own rooms. Until they are 15
years old, they sleep in the main hall of the house, and after that in
a random room assigned to the men, which can be a storage room or a
pigsty. Or they sleep temporarily in the rooms of their girlfriends,
depending on whether the woman invites them or not. In the Mosuo tribe,
men and women enter into a so-called “visiting marriage” in which they
live together, not necessarily for a long time, and can have different
partners. For Export Matriarchy,
ter Heijne had a Masuo wooden house completely reconstructed from
plastic in a reduced scale of 5:1. In the pre-fab house, which was
installed in a variety of different exhibitions, visitors could glean
an idea of a way of life that is diametrically opposed to life in a
nuclear family in Prenzlauer Berg. Additionally, ter Heijne illustrated
her encounters with the everyday life and rituals of the Mosuo in the comic book Empire of the Women—Not a Fairy Tale
(2007). The book is both a portrayal of the utopia of a more peaceful
coexistence and a documentation of an imperiled culture. “Matriarchal
society is one of these social forms that is gradually getting eaten
away, as can be observed clearly in China. It’s also interesting that
violence and rape, typical patriarchal problems, simply don’t exist.
Matriarchal societies have very similar structures to communism, except
that these structures aren’t dominated by a male elite. And it’s these
that are being eliminated by the Chinese government.” Ter Heijne talks
about how the Mosuo were forced by the state to marry and to live in
small families. “But then they went back to their women’s houses,” she
laughs, “back to the pigsty or the storage room, but in a system that
has always worked well for them.”
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