Medusa’s Head

The video “Medusa’s Head” was inspired by a visit to an underground cistern in Istanbul, where 2 stone heads of Medusa were used as pedestals supporting columns in its colonnade. Those stone heads were probably taken from an earlier temple or a sculpture commemorating Medusa.

In a columned underground cistern, a woman is slowly dancing; her dreamlike movements are punctuated by dissonant images.  The film draws on the mythological story of Medusa, symbolized as a female face surrounded by serpent hair, which has evolved from a representation of divine female wisdom in the Neolithic period to a Gorgon whose look turns men into stone, in classical Greek.

We all have heard about her; the horrible ugly woman with snakes for hair. But, in Ovid’s book – Metamorphosis, we find a more complex chronicle:

Medusa was astonishingly fair; she was desired and contended for – She was a very lovely one, Her beauty led the Ruler of the Sea To rape her in Minerva’s* sanctuary.

One day Neptune* Found her and raped her, in Minerva’s temple, Ovid, the Roman poet who lived in the fifth century BC, wrote a story akin to a contemporary ‘me too” narrative of an immense injustice: A pretty young woman is raped by a powerful god. The goddess whose temple was desecrated is livid and punishes the rapped girl. And the goddess turned away and hid her eyes Behind her shield, but she made Medusa pay: and punishing the outrage As it deserved, — she changed her hair to serpents*