In ‘The Lunch in Fur’ / ‘Le Déjeuner en Fourrure’ (2008), Mayer presents a fictional meeting in a late modernist 1960s glasshouse between three historical personalities in their later years: the artist Meret Oppenheim, the singer Josephine Baker and the photographer Dora Maar. These women, in a state of contemplation, recall different events in their lives. Like the film images, the spoken text also follows a woven, ritualized movement, which in turn broaches the question of the psychological constitution of memories. Here, touching objects, such as the chess figures, the curtains and the tape recorder, is a seminal moment which causes the protagonists to begin to recall. In ‘The Lunch in Fur’ / ‘Le Déjeuner en Fourrure’, Mayer clearly delights in reprising the depictions of space and objects between reality and dream of surrealist films, as for example the experimental short film ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’ (1943) by Maya Deren. With reference to the history of art and film, the artist drafts multiple images of memory through space and touched objects

Excerpt: Neuschwander, Simone. Rooms look back, argobooks, Berlin, Kunsthalle Basel, 2008