ULLA VON BRANDENBURG
03 September – 23 October, 2021
“Description”
Ulla von Brandenburg (*1974 Karlsruhe, DE) is a contemporary conceptual artist, currently living and working in Paris. Her work is characterized by a diversity of means and media like installations, performances, films, watercolors, murals and collages that answer to one another and which she stages according to different exhibition spaces. Perfectly mastering the codes of scenography, nourished by literature, the history of the arts and architecture but also psychoanalysis, spiritism and magic, she derives as much from esoteric rituals and popular ceremonies, as from the mechanisms and codes of the theatre, to explore the construction of our social structures. Masks, costumes, sets and props coming from different popular traditions thus allow her to transgress symbolically norms and hierarchies by subtly mingling reality and appearances in theatrical presentations. She invites the viewer to become participant by designing stages that question the relationship between illusion and reality, audience and actors. Curtains, fabrics and objects are often reused and adjusted to the current exhibition space or environment.
For the exhibition ‘Das Was’ Ulla von Brandenburg adapted a curtain that was originally shown at the Secession in Vienna in the exhibition ‘Innen ist nicht Aussen’. The red-orange curtain made of a light and airy cotton which measures 14 x 14 meters corresponds with the main exhibition space at the Secession, the Oberlichtsaal. Its faded pattern reflect the ceiling grid of the exhibition space and thus points to the site-specificity of the work as well describing a further projection of light and shadow in the traces of the sun. As is often the case in Ulla von Brandenburg’s work, the curtain is a means of marking the transition from the real world to the world of the theater, a mental space ruled by the imagination, dreams, and the unconscious, where space and time have no limits. Upon entering the exhibition space the visitor is faced with the decision to walk through the curtain and as such becoming participants or to walk around the curtain as a viewer. Several bamboo sticks leaning against the wall and painted with bright colors refer to earlier performances. The actors of von Brandenburg’s performances and video use these sticks, which are originally fishing rods used in Japan, to measure different body parts, step lengths and distances. Like stage props waiting for their next assignment they allude to past and future enactments.
A selection of two group of watercolor works, portraits of strong historic women and scenes from the circus, theater and dance, complement the exhibition. For her watercolor works the artist uses the backside found paper, ancient advertising bills, maps and book pages, which she assembles to a patchwork with irregular structure. Walking through the curtain one is faced with the life-size figure of the French poet Colette, dressed in a suit and smoking a cigarette. Like other women of her time who worked as author or artist she used to dress in man’s cloth in order to be noticed in a man’s world. Other women in the show include Elsa, an American shooter in the nineteenths century, the French anarchist Louise Michel and Rosa Luxembourg. Another series of portraits include four ballet dancers from Diaghilev’s ballet russe, two female and two male dancers who’s gender is ambiguous.
Ulla von Brandenburg’s works are included in major collections such as the Tate Modern in London, the MAMCO in Geneva, Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich, the Centre Pompidou in Paris among many others. Major solo exhibitions include George Kolbe Museum, Berlin (2021), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018), Kunsthal Aarhus (2017), Perez Art Museum Miami (2016), Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2016), Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis (2015), and MAMCO, Geneva (2014). In 2016 she was nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamps. Significant group exhibitions include Performa 15, New York (2015), 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014), 11th Biennale de Lyon, Lyon (2011), Making Worlds, 53rd International Art Exhibition Venice Biennale, Venice (2009).
