The Ideoplastic Materializations of Eva C.

Like Susan Hiller, Zoe Beloff works with female image-making that could be considered outside of the mainstream canon of art history. Beloff works with nineteenth-century spiritualism in a number of her works, such as Beyond and The Influencing Machine of Miss Natalija A., about a patient of the psychoanalyst Victor Tausk who believes her mind is being manipulated at a distance by electrical apparatus and secret far away doctors.

The Ideoplastic Materializations of Eva C. (2004), is a thirty minute 4-channel stereoscopic surround sound DVD installation with a cast including Tea Alagic, Kate Valk, Greg Mehrten, Fred Newman, Anthony Wellman, Jim Fletcher, Krishna Vutla and Robert Ankers. The viewer enters a darkened room to discover life-size stereoscopic figures that appear to inhabit our own three dimensional space. These phantoms reenact a series of ten séances held in Algeria and Paris from 1904 to 1912 with the French medium Eva C. Beloff, which points to the gender issues in which mediums became famous not for their own voice or identity but for channeling the voices of others.