Mathilde Melek An produced the performance Videos “Golddess” in Mexico, Istanbul and Cappadocia. The artist is performing in a golden armor with a headdress fusing forms of masks, crowns and helmets. Azure blue pigment powder on her skin is completing the orchestration of the birth of a goddess popping out of the blue to conquer a timeless unknown world full of secrets and oddities. The title “Golddess” is creating some of the humorous multi-layers within Mathilde Melek An’s works. The satirical touch implies all kind of serious abysses and ambiguities. Or as Mathilde Melek An describes: “She is an entity infused with the artist’s unseen yet present personal memories. Her essence is fluid and dynamic; she both becomes and shapes the collective memory each time she enters the public domain.”

Franco-Turkish artist Mathilde Melek An is working on topics like gender and identity by using her multicultural background and playing with certain visual icons and patterns. She questions cultural, sexual and territorial identity, memory both individual and collective, our relationship to legacy and its transmission through generations. The artists participated with several works to the Mahalla Festival.

In the Palazzo Zabbar the Golddess appeared on the 18th of November at 3pm at the Window of her private Boudoir in the Palazzo in Zabbar. She started a tour through the Palazzo, left to the Street and disappeared in the St. Patrick FC’s Bar.

For the Mahalla Share House the artist produced a Toolbox with a personal memorial jewelry-collection made out of plexiglass, the MAmulets. Photographs are incorporated in the objects. TOOLBOX #1  //  Travelling Light  //  2018/

Mathilde Melek An’s constant exploration leads her to experiment with new techniques, new modes of expression and new mediums in order to make a lasting image that is yet a perpetual echo of the past. The artist republishes photographic archives, both anonymous and personal resulting in new photographic and video archives. The reality reframed and recontextualized reveals images that echo and mirror archetypes of experience. Layering images or using multiple screens projects a temporal window onto our present time.

Delving into her own personal, multicultural references An abolishes the rigid borders of the established mediums fusing together photography, silk screen printing and sculpture. In a quest of origins, the image uncoils the thread of recounted stories, between collective and personal memory, and reveals the portrait of multicultural identities: our worldwide legacy.