ELINE MUGAAS

Eline Mugaas, Pillow I-IV, 2019.

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

I’ve been thinking about something that Eline Mugaas once told me: a film still that has stayed with her for a long time. The scene is from one of Constantin Brancusi’s films shot in his Paris studio. A woman is dancing on a low plinth, her body twisting as she raises her arm above her head. The movement reminded Mugaas of other images throughout art history, from antique caryatids – columns shaped like women's bodies whose function was to hold up temple roofs – to the Greek urns from the geometric period, stylised as women raising their arms above their heads and pulling their hair in grief. She thought of the writhing female bodies in the paintings of both Matisse and Modogliani, all of this reminding her of the movement made when swinging an object up on one’s head or lifting a child on one’s arm.

When Brancusi installed his Endless Columns, he filmed his trip to Romania. Mugaas watched the film repeatedly and found, in a one-and-a-half-second frame, a woman at a market carrying a tin on her head with the same form she had on her mind. She saw it as a serendipitous moment, where everything comes together, belongs to each other or is created from each other. This idea of lifting, supporting and carrying is on display in Mugaas’ work Pillow I-IV, which contains images of seated sculptures taken from the Ludovisi throne at the Roman National Museum.

(This afterimage is inspired by a text I wrote about Mugaas's work for Camera Austria.)