Ursula Mayer
The photo and film work of the Austrian artist Ursula Mayer, who lives in London, deals with the relationship between architecture and the psychological components inscribed within it. Residential domiciles and houses are the scenes of investigations pertaining to incidents occurring between the spaces and the characters found within them. The specificity of the activities thus encountered focuses primarily on a performative axis between female subjects and the architectural configurations of rooms and objects. Mayer’s photographs, which primarily serve as the basis for filmic works, attempt to develop the psychological attachment of their female subjects to the history of the individual houses. The work seen here shows a woman on the stairs in the house of an eminent London architect of the 1930s. Her facial expression clearly displays the contours of a woman tormented by anxiety, who in a Hitchcockian manner is influenced by the uncanniness and uncertainty of events taking place in the house. The ubiquity of the anxiety reception dealt with here derives from the fact that this phenomenon appears more frequently than all other psychical disturbances and that its prevalence can be traced back to a variety of factors. On account of the enormous pressure that society and the economy exert on the individual, the therapeutic question arises of how it is possible at all to lead a life without anxiety.
