Exhibition

Forum Expanded 2023

A collection of images reproduced from films, museums, and archives, Exhibition weaves together multiple biographies and texts to construct a single imaginary subject. Eija-Riitta Eklöf-Berliner-Mauer marries the Berlin Wall and turns her home into a museum of architectural miniatures to abate her longing for those objects. Mary Richardson stabs Diego Velázquez’s “The Toilet of Venus” as an act of protest and dedication to an imprisoned suffragette. Shifting into first person point-of-view, the narration combines quotations from the painter Agnes Martin, early eye tracking studies, Sigmund Freud’s case history of “Rat Man,” and an account of a Klein bottle’s misuse as a candlestick holder. The film fragments, copies, and excerpts to create a portrait of desire and trespass, becoming a meditation on the assertion and refusal of subjecthood. “I’m not a woman. I’m a doorknob.”

by Mary Helena Clark
with Audrey Wollen USA 2022 English 19’ Colour & Black/White International premiere

With

Audrey Wollen (Voice)

Crew

Director	Mary Helena Clark
Screenplay	Mary Helena Clark
Music	Eva-Maria Houben
Sound	James Emrick
Producer	Mary Helena Clark

Produced by

Mary Helena Clark

Photos

Mary Helena Clark

Mary Helena Clark is an artist working in film, video, and installation. Her work uses the language of collage to explore dissociative states through cinema, bringing together disparate subjects and styles that suggest an exterior logic or code. Using the conventions of narrative, language, and genre, her films explore shifting subjectivities and the limits of the embodied camera. She has been showing films and works in museums, art venues and festivals including IFFR, Rotterdam; New York Film Festival; Toronto International Film Festival; Cinéma du réel, Paris; and the 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York.

Filmography

2011 By foot-candle light; 9 min. 2012 Orpheus (outtakes); 6 min. 2014 The Dragon is the Frame; 15 min. 2015 Palms; 8 min. 2017 Delphi Falls; 20 min. 2018 The Glass Note; 9 min. 2020 Figure Minus Fact; 13 min. 2022 Exhibition

Bio- & filmography as of Berlinale 2023