Creative Time

During the 2007 Armory Show, Creative Time presented the U.S. premiere of Eve Sussman and The Rufus Corporation’s video-musical The Rape of the Sabine Women. Developed largely through improvisation and filmed with a cast of hundreds, the video functioned as an allegory based loosely on the myth of Romulus’s founding of Rome. The piece was further inspired by Jacques-Louis David’s 1799 painting, Intervention of the Sabine Women.

Sussman's remake of the myth as a 1960’s period piece featured the Romans as G-men; the Sabines as butchers’ daughters; and the heyday of Rome allegorically implied in an affluent international summer house. While the Roman myth traces the birth of a society, Sussman’s telling suggests the destruction of a utopia: the intervention of the women is fraught, and the chaos that ensues transforms the designed perfection into nothingness.

Photograph by Benedikt Partenheimer