“ULLA VON BRANDENBURG“ Number 267 July-September, 2009 By Katerina Gregos EMPLOYING REFERENCES from a wide variety of historical sources such as literature, psychoanalysis, theater design, photography, chess, magic and the circus, Ulla von Brandenburg has built up a mysterious, iconic vocabulary that gives rise to allusive, ambiguous and intriguing narratives that manifest themselves in drawing, installation, performance and film. Many of her works evoke a particular kind of vieux monde temperament, lending her practice a distinctive European fin de siècle atmosphere and a certain romantic angst. The starting point for her works are the images she collects, often brought together in a newspaper and presented as part of her exhibitions.

Kugel (Sphere), 2007. 16 mm film, 2 mins, B&W, no sound. Courtesy the artist; Art: Concept, Paris; Produzentengalerie, Hamburg; Pilar Corrias Gallery, London. Most of von Brandenburg’s work centers on the exploration of theater as a construct, and the boundaries between audience and actors, subject and object, reality and illusion. Relinquishing theater’s reliance on language, she selects some of its components — props, costumes, choreographed gestures and minimalist roles — exploiting their allusive properties, which have usually been significantly pared down. The expressiveness and drama of theater is eschewed in favor of a restrained approach, in which the slightest gesture or action acquires significance. Often, the device of the curtain is employed to create a threshold that demarcates the space of the theater and that of the real world, for stepping into the world of Ulla von Brandenburg is indeed crossing the threshold into a mental space governed by the imagination, the unconscious and liminal states, and where communication often takes place on a pre-linguistic level. For the 2008 2nd Turin Triennale, she made an expansive curtain installation entitled simply Five Folded Curtains (2008), inspired by the voluminous, heavy red curtains found in old theaters and cinemas. Using the fabric to create an architectural space, an empty stage set, the spectator

stepped into the work, unsure of his position. Spectator, protagonist or both? The installation functioned as a theatrical void waiting to be completed, a space for projection, a setting for a film or theater of the mind. A curtain also set the stage for the artist’s solo show at Le Plateau in Paris (2009), which brought together all the key elements of her practice in a carefully considered mis en scène. Based on a pattern inspired by harlequin costumes, with their characteristic orange and black rhombus shapes, the visitor entered the space through this curtain, which served to demarcate the worlds of external reality and artistic artifice. Upon crossing this threshold, one was confronted with one of von Brandenburg’s signature silent black-and-white films, Around (2005), in which a group of people huddled together with their backs to the audience, imperceptibly shifting counter-clockwise as the camera follows them, without ever revealing their faces. This emphasis on minimal performative action has been developed and has become a key aspect of her filmic practice, which resembles tableaux vivants: static arrangements of individuals in carefully choreographed poses performing enigmatic, significant gestures. In these works, which oscillate between painting, photography, theater and film, Brandenburg draws on different cultural and historical references, as well as older conventions of representation to create layered, symbolic, codified narratives that explore patterns of behavior and enigmatic ritual.

Above, clockwise from top left: Quilt III, 2008. 8 vests and 8 cravattes, wood, 207 x 207 cm. Art:Concept, Paris; Tanz, Makaber, 2006. Installation with curtain, Super 8mm fi lm. Project Arts Centre Dublin. Courtesy the artist; Art:Concept, Paris; Produzentengalerie, Hamburg; Pilar Corrias Gallery, London; Drapeau (Flag), 2008. 2 Trousers, 2 vestures, 2 shirts, 2 ties, wire structure, 5 m x 50 cm. Courtesy the artist; Art:Concept, Paris; Produzentengalerie, Hamburg; Pilar Corrias Gallery, London. Photo: Marc Domage; Singspiel (Songplay), 2009. B&W fi lm, 14 mins, sound. Courtesy Art:Concept, Paris; Lasso, 2009. Tinted ribbon, found image, 1400 x 5 cm and 17 x 26 cm. Courtesy Pilar Corrias Gallery, London. Photo: Thierry Bal. Characteristic of this approach is Reiter (2004), one of her first films to most faithfully recreate the 19th-century idea of a tableau vivant. Drawing from the practices of Commedia dell’Arte — the film is staged outdoors, without a script, and employs minimal props and a decidedly anti-naturalist approach — von Brandenburg sets up an uneventful scene where one has to look closely to discern the tiniest movements of the figures. Though it contains no dramatic incident, no narrative ‘progression,’ one can discern a sinister sub-text that hints at uncomfortable psychological conditions, a recurring interest in a number of her works. In other films, figures are arranged into different configurations, almost immobilized as objects or living sculptures rather than fulfilling roles as actors; in Der Brief (2004) a group congregates around the reader of a letter

while in Mi-Carême (2005) a mysterious masked figure is positioned amidst a group of seated figures. In Schlussel (2006) the camera pans a group of almost totally still figures, the only occurrencebeing the handing over of a key from one figure to another. These works recall unusual group rituals and other aspects of codified human behavior, which the artist formalizes into highly stylized ensembles that defy rational explanation or straightforward interpretation. In 8 (2007), the artist’s first film to feature multiple scenes, the camera functions as a roving eye, surveying the rooms of a French baroque castle in one single tracking shot. In each room we bear witness to an individual or group of individuals who all engage in one slight but symbolic gesture. Each scene is a threshold between past and present, reality and artifice, consciousness and the sub-conscious, and the film in its entirety seems to float in a sense of in-between, suspended time that is hard to pinpoint. The spaces of the present day are translated through the ghostly filter of historical reference, evoking a sense of fin de siècle malaise while also alluding to the uncertainties and anxieties of our own time. Poetic and dream-like but at the same time not completely divorced from reality, Brandenburg’s films advocate for the deceleration of perception, counteracting the speed with which images are transmitted and consumed nowadays. The artist’s newest film work, Singspiel (2009), made for the Venice Biennale, was shot in Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye and continues her investigation into the mechanics of theater, the exploration of constructed behavior through performance and the significance of gesture, with a special emphasis on the formal aspects of staging, as well as uneasy or unexpressed psychological states. Loosely inspired by the history of the building while it was still in the hands of its original owners, von Brandenburg constructs a series of evocative, narratively sparse episodes that revolve around what appears to be a family. Using professional actors for the first time, the artist sets up a series of cinematic encounters inside the house. As in her previous films these play out as autonomous but also interconnected episodes that rest on minimal, symbolic, sometimes even absurd gestures rather than an immediately legible narrative structure. Each gesture provides a clue for the story that unfolds. A man carries a box into a room; an elderly woman tries without success to open a door; a boy lies ill in bed; a man tries to untie a knot; we don’t know the reason for these actions but it is clear that inside the pristine interiors of the villa an underlying sense of unease pervades. Despite the utopian aspirations underlying Le Corbusier’s architecture, the reality of life in Villa Savoye was not so perfect. Singspiel thus intimates this lesser-known history of the villa, alluding to the dystopic aspect of this emblematic building. The artist’s ongoing preoccupation with early psychoanalysis is here subtly reflected in the analogy made between the purification of the soul and the purification of architecture with a view to attaining a higher state of being and living, respectively. Singspiel hints at the human cracks and fissures that ‘inhabit’ this seemingly perfect space, as well as the mental states that remain unspoken or repressed.

Folded Curtains, 2008. Installation view. Courtesy Art:Concept, Paris. Von Brandenburg’s performances form a direct link to her film work. Singplay, a performance held at Tate in 2007, recreates the idea of the tableau vivant and is a precedent for the film Singspiel. Positioning live figures in a composition like that of a painting or photograph on stage, the ‘actors’ mimed to the sound of a German song creating a disorienting, perturbing effect. Singplay brings together some of the key motifs in Ulla von Brandenburg’s oeuvre and transforms them into a live performative act. Though performance and especially film form a very important aspect of her practice, it is impossible to understand the artist’s work as a whole without taking into consideration the other elements of her work such as her drawings, for example. Predominantly anthropocentric, executed in a fluid, colorfield-like style on thin, translucent paper, these portraits appear ghostly, almost ready to dissolve, and infer a looming sense of vulnerability and mortality. Her wall drawings appear more ‘solid,’ if more abstract, and often are configured into immersive environments. Untitled (2003), a work that is based on an 1858 photograph by the British pictorialist photographer Henry Peach Robinson, depicts a dying girl surrounded by three members of her family. Von Brandenburg enlarged and simplified the image, blacking over details, leaving only the whitest areas unpainted and thus creating a haunting negative effect. The image raises questions about the changing methods of representation over time and differing media. Publicum (2008), another wall drawing that has been re-created on numerous occasions, represents a seated public in a theater. We cannot see the spectacle to which they are a witnesses, for they are themselves turned into a spectacle, the image confronting us with a consideration of our own role as spectators. Forest III (2009) is a similarly abstracted wall drawing of a forest, set in an oval architectural panorama. Here one is immersed into an artificial environment, one that recalls lofty nineteenth-century romantic representations of nature, but which here has been rendered slightly sinister and uncanny. This sense of the uncanny permeates many aspects of her practice, such as her sculptures and installations made in fabric — which are inspired by sources such as flags, heraldry, modernist decorative motifs and theater costumes. Quilt III (2008), for example, consists of eight sets of vests, trousers and ties, sewn together to form a symmetrical circular pattern. The work alludes to the absent or departed body, while the garments themselves hint at some unspecified ritual. Altogether, von Brandenburg’s multi-disciplinary practice constitutes a coherent, visually arresting, conceptually dense and open-ended oeuvre. The artist has managed to create her own singular idiomatic language which inventively explores issues about the changing nature of representation, the boundaries between illusion and reality, life and death, and the relationship to theater and visual art, always implicating the viewer in a process of de-codification where an ever-pervasive sense of latent expectancy frustrates the attainment of any finite conclusion. Though her work evokes past and present, it belongs neither to one nor to the other; rather von Brandenburg has created her own distinct chronotope that always reminds us of the complex continuum between past, present and future. Katerina Gregos is an art critic and writer based in Brussels. Ulla von Brandenburg was born in Karlsruhe in 1974. She lives and works in Paris. Selected solo shows: 2009: Le Plateau-FRAC, Île de France, Paris. 2008: Chisenhale, London; CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco; Kunstverein, Düsseldorf; Docking Station, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 2007: Art:Concept, Paris; Produzentengalerie, Hamburg. 2006: Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Kunsthalle, Zurich. Selected group shows: 2009: 53rd Venice Biennale. 2008: “Legende,” Domaine départemental de Chamarande, France; Yokohama Triennial, Japan; 2 Turin Triennial, Italy; “Wizard of Oz,” CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco; “Vier,” MMK, Frankfurt; “Fables du doute,” Centre d’art contemporain de Noisy-le-Sec, France; “The World as a Stage,” ICA, Boston, USA/Tate Modern, London; “... 5 Min Later,” KW, Berlin. 2007: Performa07, New York; Prague Biennale 3. 2005: “I Still Believe in Miracles,” ARC MAM, Paris.

“Artist of the week 66: Ulla von Brandenburg” All the world's a stage for this German artist, whose unsettling films are haunted by sinister figures and secret symbols December 2, 2009 By Skye Sherwin

'Hypnotic and hallucinatory' ... a still from Ulla von Brandenburg's film 8. Photograph: Pilar Corrias, London

Ulla von Brandenburg's art looks haunted. The people, props and locations that feature in her silvery 8mm films, installations and blurry watercolours seem troubled by an invisible presence. Arcane symbols point to some kind of hidden meaning.

A leading figure in the new generation of artists who are interested in performance, Von Brandenburg's films often reimagine scenes from the past in present-day settings. Her recreations of scenes from paintings feature up-to-date looking casts, who sometimes act out despair or stand as if lost in thought. It seems as if time has been petrified, even as the camera runs on. Yet trembling limbs and clothes fluttering in the breeze reveal the trick behind this literal tableau vivant. All the world's a stage.

Her 2007 film 8 is a continuous take in which the camera glides around actors standing in a French chateau. Among them is a sinister figure whose features are covered with a handkerchief. Even as his breath lifts the silky cloth away from his face, it seems as if his role is that of a corpse. We're caught in an uncertain space between life, death and the representation of both.

In her latest film The Objects, Von Brandenburg abandons actors in favour of a procession of props. The camera moves through a looping series of chessboards, flutes, fans, mirrors and coils of rope, which dance away from us, suspended on pieces of string. As hypnotic and hallucinatory as these animated artefacts seem, the artist always reminds us of backstage mechanics, probing the distance between artistic ideals and lived experience.

Why we like her: For Singspiel, her captivating, impressively choreographed 2009 film set in Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye. Shot in a continuous take with actors miming words to a forlorn song, it explores the far-from-happy experience of the family that inhabits one of the architect's "machines for living".

Do put your daughter on the stage: Von Brandenburg studied theatre design before moving into visual art.

Where can I see her? Her new exhibition, Wagon Wheel, is at London's Pilar Corrias gallery until 30 January 2010.

“Ulla Von Brandenburg”

October 14, 2010 By Maria Kjær Themsen

There is something specifically European and old-fashioned about Ulla von Brandenburg’s stage settings, themes and sound. Her latest performance Chorspiel (2010) could have been taken from a Thomas Mann novel. The Buddenbrook family came to mind when you saw the four performers on stage: the old grandfather, the chubby grandmother, the mother and the young daughter, all passing their time in the same living room – playing matches, resting on the couch, disputing or trying to untie a large knot. Everything is at once structured yet loaded with the heavy burden of being part of a family. As the play progress however, the family’s life is interrupted by a young man – the Wanderer – who comes to play a central role in the play as the potentially dangerous and unknown element, but also the one who could grant the family a new life.

Chorspiel was shown four times over three days at Malmö’s Lilith Performance Studio, the first combined production studio and arena in Europe for visual art performances. Here performance art can explore its full potential rather than being relegated to comic relief at a vernissage or the painful scene of some art party. The venue is dedicated solely to this particular genre of visual art and is completely transformed for each performance. In this case, Von Brandenburg realized a 70-metre wall painting depicting black and white natural scenery populated by shadowy figures, creating a structured wilderness that engulfed the audience. This backdrop seemed to mimic the rather dark tone of the play and the strange symbolism of the dialogue, which had more in common with the lyrics of an opera than with the speeches of a play.

As in Singplay, her 2007 performance at Tate Modern, the characters mimicked a song that was being performed live on stage. But in Singplayit was Von Brandenburg herself who sang all the lyrics, which created a disjuncture between the character of the young man who seemed to speak with the female voice of the artist. In Chorspiel – as the title suggests – the lyrics were sung by a choir consisting of both men and women. The music, also written by Von Brandenburg, was arranged as a classical canon, which also underlined the sense of something archaic, and it filled the whole studio with the beautiful sound of something that came close to an elegy.

The faces of the actors trying to follow the sung lyrics created a strange heterogeneous effect, as the words of the choir and the facial expressions of the actors rarely managed to correspond. It is these little displacements that seem to be of essential importance in Von Brandenburg’s work, as is the concept of time. In this performance, it is nearly as if time is a physical presence, showed very specifically by the strangely slow gestures of the actors – the three-generations of the family continuously trying to untie a knot, which became almost an illustration of their individual lifelines and mutual interconnectedness. And, as the choir intoned, ‘We have not chosen it ourselves, life is done to us … now we are here, but for how long?’