Tagesspiegel, SPIELZEIT-Portrait Eva Meyer-Keller - by Sandra Luzina
The performers feed an apple down into the foot of a pair of tights, tie the assemblage around themselves and begin to spin on the spot. In this way, Rutherford’s ‘planetary’ model of the atom, in which the nucleus, a positively charged sphere is orbited by negatively charged electrons, is depicted in a simple and playful way.
Her artistic research is driven by fundamental questions, “I am primarily interested in asking what sort of a world we actually live in – and how is it obtained?” She tries time and again to make the inexplicable or hard to understand tangible, whether it is natural disasters, as in “Cooking Catastrophes” or here with the theories of quantum physics.
You realise that Eva has delved deep into complicated subject matter. In the beginning, she says, she had a certain reluctance to examine modern physics. As playful as her approach is however, it owes nothing to ignorance. “I have a deep respect for the work of scientists”, she emphasises, “But as an artist I have the opportunity to go about things in a totally different way.” There is very little contact between art and science and she is convinced that both sides would profit from a dialogue. In her current project, she exchanged ideas with the Berlin based physicist Alexander Carmele and how she’s hooked, “I’m really interested in making a series of work that looks at the rather inaccessible areas of science – always in close collaboration with a scientist.”