Mara Mattuschka
The oeuvre of Bulgarian-born artist Mara Mattuschka spans several decades and consists primarily of short films. Masquerade and unusual poses characterize these films’ surreal and witty plots, in which body art and performance are handled with persistent irony. The artist herself takes on various personae such as Mimi Minus and Madame Ping Pong and implements animated film techniques, thereby harking back to the work of her former teacher Maria Lassnig. Probing media technology and sound has played a crucial role in her work from the very beginning. Stark visual contrasts and distorted images sometimes
render the artist near-unrecognizable. Her films’ frequently short scenes show fragments of the imagination depicted through their respective spatial realities, with unusual compositions and angles serve to emphasize the immediacy of the artist’s performative gestures. In such moments of masquerade, Mattuschka steps into different roles that often become carnivalesque in a way similar to Cindy Sherman’s self-stylizations. For Mattuschka, close-ups of the face have become a trademark, highlighting facial expressions and extreme features. The act of masking and putting on make-up or other colored liquids and paints is an iterative process designated to hint at the malleability not only of the face but of the human body in general. By taking on multiple identities, the artist problematizes the construct of identity as such, ironizing it in grotesque scenes. Mattuschka has appeared in most of her films since the 1980s with changing appearances as well as gender identities—mostly female, but also male. Her work can hence be viewed as part of a gender and queer discourse focused on non-binary body postures and (auto-)erotic scenes. The personae in Mattuschka’s films undergo endless metamorphoses, demonstrating the artist’s ability to constantly transform herself and create a plethora of identities that sometimes also denote creatures from outer space. Deformed and fragmented body parts reveal a heterogenous universe of identity constructions in which the artist’s self reflects the socially and psychologically determined Other. W.S.
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