Secession presents Ulla von Brandenburg: Innen ist nicht Außen an exhibition on view through November 10, 2013.
In her films, drawings, and installations, 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. In her first solo exhibition in Austria, Innen ist nicht Außen [Inside Is Not Outside], Ulla von Brandenburg will show her new film Die Straße [The Street] as part of an installation which she created specially for Secession’s main gallery.
The black-and-white film Die Straße shows a man entering an unfamiliar village community where he is confronted with the rituals and conventions governing the villagers’ social interaction. In a single, uncut tracking shot, the camera, like a third person, follows the actors’ performances, staged by von Brandenburg in an ephemeral Potemkin village made of white canvases in the open air.
“He enters another world and tries to understand the various goings-on that strike him as foreign. It’s as if he were time-traveling, although it’s not quite clear what sort of temporal context he has landed in, and there is no real development in the sequence of events.”
(Ulla von Brandenburg, interview with Nina Möntmann)
The stylized film set, the mysterious rituals that govern the performers’ interactions, and their alternating singing lends the film a particular poetry.
Die Straße represents a logical development in Ulla von Brandenburg’s work. Her early black-andwhite films feature seemingly motionless tableaux of people performing minimal actions; they explore ritualized behavioral patterns and the relationship between reality and illusion. One typical example is her film 8 from 2007, in which the camera moves through suites of rooms in a Baroque French castle, encountering individuals or groups of people who perform enigmatic gestures, laden with meaning. Her film Shadowplay (2012) also addresses the doubling inherent in acting and the tension between directed performance, identification with the role, and the performer’s own identity. A woman and two men meet in a theater dressing room; they put on their costumes and their makeup, get into character and start dueling. www.secession.at