Zoe Beloff

Although Beloff is a contemporary artist who employs twenty-first–century digital technology, her research and her persona are very much of the nineteenth century. Like a cross between a nineteenth-century inventor and a sensitive medium herself, Beloff tweaks technology and its tools in order to better transmit the unseen, the unheard, and the undocumented. Beloff is creating her own history of Victorian-era culture as it relates to women’s history and the technologies of disembodiment. Part soap opera and part meditation on how imagination, desire, and gender collude to create parallel worlds, The Ideoplastic Materializations of Eva C is a reenactment of ten séances held between 1910 and 1914 with the famous French medium. Eva C was a celebrity in Paris and her powerful sensitivities to communicate with the “other side” were championed by many French intellectuals and civic leaders of the time. Her performance of the otherworldly perfectly embodies the contradictions of the gender inequality of the era, in which a woman was celebrated not for giving voice to her own opinions but for making herself a vessel for the spirits of the dead. Based upon rigorous historical research Beloff has resuscitated the life of Eva C, and in doing so brings her back to life in a 3-D video installation that creates an experience that is every bit as immersive and elusive, hokey and uncanny as a Victorian-era séance might have been.

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