circlesquare

Eva Meyer-Keller’s video work  CIRCLESQUARE is based on research material for the piece THINGS ON A TABLE, which she developed in collaboration with the artist Uta Eisenreich. Both projects are based on Gertrude Stein’s modernist text, “Objects Lie on a Table”, written in 1922, which plays with the topics of still life and objects, with what they are called in language, the sound of the words and our perception of them. In CIRCLESQUARE, Eva Meyer-Keller takes up elements of the piece and develops them in an interplay between two and three-dimensionality. Objects repeatedly exceed their modest, recognisable shape and transform into new figures and situations. The text offers us associations that connect our perception to the simple shapes but which immediately dissolve in a shimmer, drawing attention to the contingency of our perception. Borrowing cubist techniques, the text breaks language and perspective apart to form new compositions, occupying the space between the visual, the musical and the verbal.

Both artists independently developed other works based on this joint performance project. Eva Meyer-Keller and Uta Eisenreich both play with everyday consumer goods in their own ways. Eisenreich arranges household objects and products into enigmatic still lifes that are non-sensory or multi-sensory and often play with semiotics, systems and word games. For her part as a performance maker, Eva Meyer-Keller plays with products to abstractly represent the unspeakable: murder, catastrophes and other calamities.