Dropping In and Out — A Response to Uncertainty brings together artistic and scholarly perspectives that engage with the ruptures and detours in the biographies of deceased artists and historical female figures across various disciplines. Instead of linear success stories, the works unveil multifaceted narratives of exclusion, resistance, care, and communal forms of knowledge. Drawing on biographical research, letters, and artistic works, the exhibition presents multimedia pieces that emerged from an open dialogue within the framework of the interdisciplinary, artist-research project of the same name.
The researchers engage, at times in deeply personal ways, with the lives of women from past centuries. In doing so, they reveal not only their own relationships to these historical figures, but also lesser-known episodes and developments in the women’s lives and work.
For example, we learn that the politically active Marie-Jeanne Philipon Roland (1754–1793), a key figure during the French Revolution, deliberately wrote autobiographical texts shortly before her execution in order to leave future generations an account of her life in her own words. The biography of Zofia Rydet (1911–1997) reveals that she did not begin her photographic career until she was over forty years old. Nevertheless, she is now regarded as one of Poland’s most important photographers, achieving international recognition above all for her long-term photographic documentation of people in their private living spaces. Dora Benjamin (1901–1946), meanwhile, was not only a socialist economist and psychologist but also worked across disciplines. In 1929, she curated the exhibition Gesunde Nerven (Healthy Nerves) in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Through its innovative display strategies, she examined the impact of working conditions and urban life on mental health—a subject that remains as relevant today as ever.
Each research-based artistic contribution to Dropping In and Out – A Response to Uncertainty constructs a personal portrait of the historical figures it engages with. Its strength lies precisely not in striving for an imagined completeness, but in the fragments that emerge through individual perspectives, encounters, and entanglements.
Initiated as an interdisciplinary project by Berlin-based artists Mathilde ter Heijne and Vanessa Gravenor (Berlin University of the Arts) in collaboration with literary scholar Jessica Goodman (St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford), Dropping In and Out – A Response to Uncertainty examines how different historical and geographical contexts shape the perception and reception of women’s artistic legacy, and how we, as authors and cultural practitioners today, can help to bring back into view the works and influence of those who came before us.
The project aims to highlight gaps in the genealogical narratives of feminist actors and to foster mutual solidarity across temporal and spatial boundaries. In doing so, it traces the patterns of erasure and disappearance in the biographies of women artists and explores the significance of feminist perspectives for artistic production and historiography.
Program
Our Voices in the Wind: A Rupture in the Fabric of the Norm
Performative Reading, Film Screening, Q&A
24.10.2026 // 19:00-21:00
Performative Reading by Students from the Time Based Media and Performance Class, UdK Berlin
In today’s precarious climate beset by social and economic unrest, how do emerging artists narrate their careers that are shaped by fluxes, breaks or shifts? These ruptures could be due to illness, migration, war, care work, or other forces that impact one’s career, yet often are signalled through gaps on a CV. By writing letters to historical actors who had similar experiences and through imaginary dialogues with them, new perspectives and points of orientation are created for future movements. Through the letter reading, the past will disturb dominant modes of history making and telling: in essence how queer-feminist legacies are shaped by rupturing the norm.
Film Screening and Q&A
Mathilde, Mathilde, 5 min. 1998, Mathilde ter Heijne
The video features dialogue from French films in which the female protagonists are named Mathilde. Their stories revolve around romantic dependence and each ends in suicide. Through the montage of the suicide scenes reenacted by the artist, an interwoven narrative emerges in which the cinematic characters are superimposed onto the artist’s body. However, the appearance of a film dummy—a replica of the artist—breaks the cinematic illusion and thereby nullifies the deadly logic of this repeating cycle of dependence.
(François Truffaut, La Femme d’à côté, 1981; Jean-Claude Brisseau, Noce blanche, 1989; Patrice Leconte, Le Mari de la coiffeuse, 1990)
Paper Swallows Rock, 17 min. 2021, Vanessa Gravenor
Entwined around the character Vanessa – a double for the artist’s self – Paper Swallows Rock is a portrait of the artist whose research gets interrupted by her reality. While tracing extremist learning books produced during the Soviet Afghani War, Vanessa participates in a French psychological study on memory following the Paris 2015 terrorist attacks she was wounded in. The self becomes material history to narrate.
