Hester Scheurwater

filmmaker/artist

Scheurwater's work consists of short films, video performances and installations which try to express desires, fears and obsessions in an alarming manner. Through an intuitive way of filmmaking an intimate inner picture is depicted.

These pictures show daydreams (fantasies/nightmares) which in a fragmented manner make a suggestive picture tale visible in which grotesque doll-like women show their incapacity to contact with the outside world. The woman as an object, isolated and absent sometimes
thrown back on basic animal instincts "female behaviour".

QUOTE
Carla Barger about Scheurwater’s short films distributed by Video Data Bank : In these five shorts, the Dutch video artist Hester Scheurwater sets the camera, and thus the viewer, up as a voyeur of a violent and sterile world. In each piece, we are witness to a female figure who seems almost like a grotesque doll, and whose space is continually violated by the camera. Each piece contains a solitary woman whose face is obscured partially or entirely by her hair while her body is exposed. A certain brutality has taken place or is in process by the time we enter. Scheurwater's women are devoid of voice, devoid of identity; devoid of clothing except for sexual costume--black lingerie and/or high heels, heavy makeup that looks more like bruises than beautification, and devoid of shelter from our continual gaze and exploration. This is a powerful and macabre exploration of disconnection and isolation, and of woman as object.