Eva Meyer-Keller

Works with Live Art Danmark
2007 “Death is Certain” at Berliner Luft 3
2018 “Sounds Like Catastrophes” at Live Art for Børn (with Sybille Müller)
2019 “Sounds Like Catastrophes”, recipe for Performanceopskrifter (with Sybille Müller)
2022 “Sounds Like Catastrophes” workshop in Trondheim/Norway.

Death is Certain
Have you ever wondered how you would murder a cherry? In this performance that we showed at Berliner Luft 3, German artist Eva Meyer-Keller comes up with just about every possible way. Cherries are smashed, popped, electrocuted, burned and  hanged, as the performer, dressed in a white labcoat,  matter-of-factly tries them all out in this amusing and slightly scary performance.

Photos: Ellen Friis

Sounds Like Catastrophes
For our festival Live Art for Children 2018, we commissioned Eva to develop this original work in collaboration with Sybille Müller and the six children who performed it. The piece is part of a series of works that intuitively research catastrophes. It examines the quietness and loudness of the gently increasing or sudden sounds we associate with various catastrophic events. As part of an initial workshop, the children assembled an orchestra of everyday materials and objects which served as sounding boards and instruments. Vigorously playing these homemade instruments, they composed the sounds of thunderous storms, blazing fires and rumbling earthquakes which were performed on stage as the children take turns conducting, playing and recording the sound effects in front of the audience. Combined with spoken texts, fragments of the live recordings are played back into the performance space, conjuring associations, memories and future scenarios into a many-voiced sound collage.

Sounds like Catastrophes. Foto: Ellen Friis

Sounds Like Catastrophes Performance Recipe
Based on their performance, Eva and Sybille developed a recipe that makes the work accessible for future audiences, and inspires them to become active as performers themselves. Just like the children in the original piece, they are prompted to create sounds and scores for catastrophes using everyday materials.

Sounds Like Catastrophes Workshop Trondheim
We revisited Eva’s work “Sounds Like Catastrophes” and the recipe that was derived from it as part of a presentation of our collection of Performance Opskrifter in September 2022 in Trondheim. Children and adults worked together to create scary sounds using non-threatening materials like bowls of water, paper and cornflakes, and had a lot of fun with it, as the video below demonstrates.

About the Artist
Eva Meyer-Keller (1972) lives and works in Berlin. She works at the interface of performance and visual art. Before graduating from the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in Amsterdam she studied photography and visual art in Berlin (HdK) and London (Central St. Martins and Kings College).

Her artwork is distinctive due to its meticulous attention to detail. Eva often uses everyday objects from her immediate surroundings, things that she finds at home, in the supermarket or in the tool shed. This inevitably lends the work an obsessive, domestic aesthetic. Her working method is marked by a constructive disregard for the imposition of any boundary between visual and performing arts.

Find more info on the artist’s website.