EWVA European Women's Video Art

Maria VEDDER

Key Works

 

The Heartbeat of Anubis (Der Herzschlag des Anubis) (1988)

4m 57s

Umatic

 

with Bettina Gruber

In The Hearbeat of Anubis, Maria Vedder and Bettina Gruber employ mythological elements from ancient Egypt and natural and staged scenes to reflect upon concepts of Life and Death.

In a ‘boustrophedonic choral dance’, the image

of Anubis — God of Death, represented by the dog or the jackal, who led the souls of the departed towards the west over the waters in the underworld — alternates with Horus, the falcon whose eyes are the sun and the moon and whose wing tips touch the earth.

These mythological scenes — memory of an ancient and oneiric past — are alternated

to two contemporary, parallel- conceived scenes: a man breathing a tooter with two feathers, which creates a rhythmic musical ode to the ka, the winging pneuma, the soul ascending to its destination; and a hunting leopard prevailing on an antelope, a powerful metaphor of the natural cycle of life.

 

Music by Bettina Gruber, Igor Tillmann, Uwe Wiesemann and Gerhard Zilligen

 

 

The Geometrical Locus Of All Points (Der Geometrische Ort Aller Punkte) (1984)

7m 40s

Umatic

 

Three films are played simultaneously on three monitors, which are placed next to each other in a row. The films are constructed in such a way that they change between melting together into one three-monitor-image of three single images. But all the time they are connected by visual and acoustical rhythm.

 

By watching these changing, sometimes quiet and sometimes pulsating images, the multitudity of human existence comes to mind, the different conditions of life, as being torn apart or finding unity and the constant flow of the time. The eternal human condition interpreted with the medium video.

 

Music by Holger Czukay

 

 

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