Secession presents Ulla von Brandenburg Innen ist nicht Außen open from Wednesday, September 18.
In her films, installations, performances, and drawings, German artist Ulla von Brandenburg explores how things are staged and made theatrical. The relationship between audience and actors, the rules of performance, and the overlap between reality and illusion are themes addressed in her work.
Ulla von Brandenburg’s first solo exhibition in Austria will show her new film, Die Strasse, within the context of an installation the artist created specially for Secession’s main gallery. There are no cuts in this black-and-white film; the camera tracks the actors’ performance in one single shot. The set is an ephemeral Potemkin village which Ulla von Brandenburg constructed in the open air, mainly using white canvas. The stylized film set, the mysterious and enigmatic rituals that seem to govern the performers’ interactions, and their intermittent bursts of singing render the film unexpectedly poetic.
Reflecting the film’s thematic thrust, the installation that surrounds it explores different planes of reality and the blurred boundaries between what is and what merely seems to be. The projection room is preceded by a walk-in theater complete with curtains in different colors, steps, platforms, and various audience spaces. This scenario, which plays with notions of onstage and offstage, outside and inside, confronts viewers with themselves and their own role. As is often the case in Ulla von Brandenburg’s work, curtains are a means of marking the boundary between the real world and the world of the theater—an ideal space in which imagination, dreams, and the unconscious rule, where time and space are insignificant.
Ulla von Brandenburg, born in Karlsruhe in 1974, lives and works in Hamburg and Paris.
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