Links Hall: Eva Meyer-Keller

Death Is Certain

Links Hall in collaboration with the Goethe – Institut
3111 N. Western Avenue
Thursday, February 25 @ 7 pm – FREE
Friday, February 26, @ 7PM – 15 regular price / 12 students

Eva Meyer-Keller (1972) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. She works at the interface of performance and visual art. She has presented her work in 30 countries on 6 continents in a wide range of contexts and sites. Before studying for four years at the School for New Dance Development (SNDO), Amsterdam she studied Photography and visual art (HdK), Berlin and London (Central St. Martins and Kings College). Eva develops projects alone and in collaboration with other artists. She also lends herself as a devisor/performer to other choreographers and woks as a dramaturgical/mentor. Own work Her artwork is distinctive due to its meticulous attention to detail. Eva often uses everyday objects from her immediate surroundings, things that she finds at home, in the supermarket or in the tool shed. This inevitably lends the work an obsessive, domestic aesthetic Her working method always remains marked by the constructive disregard for maintaining any boundary between the visual and performing arts.
www.evamk.de

Cherries have tender skin, meat and a kind of bone inside them. Their juice is red like blood. When you treat them like humans sometimes treat other humans, then they become human themselves or at least animate objects, which invite you to identify yourself with them. 
Inspired by fairy tales, where sometimes objects come to life and so become a projection screen for your own experiences and fantasies. In the performance „Death is Certain“ Eva Meyer-Keller has installed sweet cherries as her protagonists. The stalks are removed from the fruit, but they are not washed or stoned. Instead they are being killed. She takes care of this business manually, in a way which turns the everyday into something brutal. The viewer is reminded of deaths from films, but also the reality of executions, how they really happen: associations from individual and collective experience in the face of sweet death at the kitchen table.
In her performance, the Berlin artist Eva Meyer-Keller cuts up, fragments and burns cherries in a minutely finicky operation, subjecting them to numerous forms of torment. The fruits are stylised into subjects, and everyday objects become instruments for killing, which the viewer is inclined to associate with a torture scenario. Meyer-Keller alienates thumbtacks, plastic cups and pins, putting them to work on the cherries and so setting up the discursive framework for this game of vicarious roles. No one, it seems, can feel safe, for we all have concrete images in our memory – images from films, experiences, news items, matters that in the end lend their significance to these actions, bringing the cherries to life and making chocolates figure as a graveyard. The consistency and colour of the cherries seem particularly well chosen, making them an ideal symbolic vehicle for the experiments to which they are subjected. Meyer-Keller engages in a savagely ironic game with the collective and individual images of killing that populate the imagination of every individual. Here, she uses the cherry as a paradoxical stylised figure for the black humour that is involved.

http://www.centrepompidou.fr/cpv/ressource.action?param.id=FR_R-d1eb75523a83c5218bb6204cb540b989&param.idSource=FR_E-9c6727c5bd0427d7801efeb49de48
http://www.julia-stoschek-collection.net/ausstellungen/archiv/number-three-here-and-now/eva-meyer-keller/eva-meyer-keller-video.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKianBD6ru4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgctf7KEGro