Mathilde ter Heijne (born 1969 in Strasbourg, France) is a Berlin-based Dutch artist primarily working within the mediums of video, performance, and installation practices.
This internal perpetual state of abjection or what Griselda Pollock has called the trauma of being born into a phallocentric world are both concepts that ter Heijne contends with and untimely rips apart.
To counteract cultural amnesia, she re-presents these biographies in the context of the art institution converting forgotten once relevant lives into speaking testimonies that reverberate traces through the present.
In the installation, cast bodies lay on an elevated stage as an operatic chorus from Christoph Willibald Gluck's opera Iphigénie en Tauride is heard in the background.
Oliver Koerner von Gustorf in ArtMag: "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.