ATOM Spirit

2016

Director | Artist: Ursula Mayer

Costume Design and Styling: Meg Andrew

The film ‘Atom Spirit’ is a speculative narrative set in a near future of increasing biomedical innovation. The film, partly set in Trinidad & Tobago, will follow the work of a group of evolutionary geneticists studying and collecting DNA from all forms of life in order to create a cryogenically frozen Ark. ‘Atom Spirit’ presents a cyborgian future of techno-science in which the residual resonances of extinct civilisations is still felt. Through blending science and mythology ‘Atom Spirit’ ruminates upon the effects of computational and biological technologies on future iterations of humanity and the environment.

MEDEA

2013

Director | Artist: Ursula Mayer

Costume Design and Styling: Meg Andrew

The ancient legend of Medea contrasts two oppositional worlds – the old archaic world of Medea and the modern rational world of Jason. With a script by academic Patricia MacCormack, Mayer riffs on Pasolini’s version of ‘Medea’ (1969), a version that enacts the collision between ancient ritual and modern rationality. Mayer’s rendition of Medea moves the narrative still further, to meditate upon the possible emancipatory potentials of renegotiated gender formations and posthuman ontology.

Gonda

2012

Director | Artist: Ursula Mayer

Costume Design and Styling: Meg Andrew

Gonda is informed by Ayn Rand’s 1934 play ‘Ideal.’ In the play’s script, controversial Russian-American writer and philosopher Rand lays out her philosophical system of ‘Objectivism’ with its stubbornly anti-altruistic and individualistic position. As a critical counter to Rand’s position, Gonda creates kaleidoscopic printed spaces in which image and text shift roles to affect presupposed ideals of identity and existence. Noting how the cinematic image actually gazes back on us, Mayer utilises highly stylised and precisely composed imagery, featuring Dutch transgender model Valentijn de Hingh.

LAST HOURS OF ANCIENT SUNLIGHT

2009

Director | Artist: Ursula Mayer

Costume Design and Styling: Meg Andrew

The film stages the collision of ancient myth and modern dance through a split screen. One side of the screen slowly roves over a Roman frieze depicting the myth of Medea. Running parallel on the adjacent side of the screen, actors perform an avant-garde inspired dance, responding directly to the gestures and actions depicted in the aforementioned frieze. These simultaneous streams of film sharing the screen create a synchronicity between past and present, overlapping different temporalities and causing them to converge.

THE LUNCH IN FUR (Le Déjeuner en Fourrure)

2008

Director | Artist: Ursula Mayer

Costume Design and Styling: Meg Andrew

Mayer presents a fictional meeting in a late modernist 1960s glasshouse between three historical personalities in their later years: the artist Meret Oppenheim, the singer Josephine Baker and the photographer Dora Maar. These women, in a state of contemplation, recall different events in their lives. Like the film images, the spoken text also follows a woven, ritualised movement, which in turn broaches the question of the psychological constitution of memories. Here, touching objects, as the chess figures, the curtains and the tape recorder, is a seminal moment which causes the protagonists to begin to recall.

THE CRYSTAL GAZE

2007

Director | Artist: Ursula Mayer

Costume Design and Styling: Meg Andrew

In 'Crystal Gaze' three women occupy a lavish setting, namely in the magnificently art deco rooms of the Eltham Palace in London. With help of these women, who are wearing impeccable period clothing and pearl jewellery – reminiscent of the excessive 1920s - Ursula Mayer is able to create a visual parallel to the tradition of the classical Hollywood film and its iconic actors. In contrast to her previous films, there is a script – however it is in the form of single statements, monologues and quotes. Cinematic role-playing shows a complicated web of dramatisation, camera and staging.