Eve Sussman, an artist and movie producer, was born in England, to American parents, in 1961. She was educated at Robert College of Istanbul, University of Canterbury and Bennington College. She resides in Brooklyn, New York, where her company, the Rufus Corporation is based; however, she continuously visits cultural centers around the world, where her exhibitions take place. Besides the United States, and the Whitney Museum of American Art amongst other institutions her work has been exhibited in Turkey, Austria, United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Croatia, France, Poland, and Canada.
The Rape of the Sabine Women is an episode in the legendary history of Rome in which the first generation of Roman men acquired wives for themselves from the neighboring Sabine families (in this context, rape means abduction—raptio—rather than its prevalent modern meaning of sexual violation). Recounted by Livy and Plutarch ('Parallel Lives' II, 15 and 19), it provided a subject for Renaissance and post-Renaissance works of art that combined a suitably inspiring example of the hardihood and courage of ancient Romans with the opportunity to depict multiple semi-clothed figures in intensely passionate struggle. Comparable subjects from Classical Antiquity are the Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs and the theme of Amazonomachy, the battle of Theseus with the Ama.
Eve Sussman & The Rufus Corporation’s version of the myth of the Sabine women, a largely improvised video set in the 1960s, explores complex contemporary territory. Filmed in Germany and Greece and sublimely scored by Jonathan Bepler, the work intertwines several lines of imagery and loose narrative. Dark-suited, purposeful men stride through the Pergamon Museum’s classical statuary or the baggage area of an airport; the men observe and abduct women from within a crowded meat market; and they all lounge around a sleek modern home in a post-party atmosphere of collective ennui. Here, the video radically reinvents the love triangle of the myth (the Sabine women, the Sabine men, and the Roman men). It focuses instead on subtler and more familiar interactions among the women and their captors. Tensions build, new bonds fray, and the group’s almost-utopian moment of domestic coexistence devolves into the climactic battle scene that ends the work, a carefully orchestrated melee that evokes imagery from art history.
One of the foundational myths of Rome, the story of the Sabine women has inspired writers and artists for two thousand years. As the ancient writer Livy tells the tale, there were no women in early Rome and thus no possibility of children who would continue the new city-state beyond one generation. When diplomatic attempts to arrange intermarriage failed, the Roman leaders resorted to trickery: they invited their neighbors the Sabines to a festival and betrayed their trust by abducting the unsuspecting Sabine women. The Romans married the women and won them over so thoroughly that when Sabine soldiers later returned to fight the Romans, the Sabine women: “went boldly into the midst of the flying missiles with disheveled hair and rent garments. Running across the space between the two armies they tried to stop any further fighting and calm the excited passions by appealing to their fathers in the one army and their husbands in the other..."
Important visualizations of the myth include Nicolas Poussin’s seventeeth-century painting of the abduction and Jacques-Louis David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799). David’s painting focuses on the moment of return: in the midst of tumult, a woman extends her arms to separate two soldiers, seeking conciliation rather than further bloodshed.
All photos are from the film and exibition "The Rape of the Sabine Women" by Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation
