Ulla von Brandenburg

1974 | Karlsruhe, Germany

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Ulla von Brandenburg — AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

Portrait Ulla von Brandenburg, © Photo: Jan Northoff

German visual artist.

Ulla von Brandenburg has been working in France since 2005. After first studying scenography in Karlsruhe, she then turned to visual arts, attending the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg. This dual training in theatre and art left an indelible mark on her oeuvre, which spans multiple media: video, installation, performance, drawing, murals, singing and sculpture. Each medium contributes to the creation of immersive environments and “penetrable plays”, in which spectators are plunged into visual and sensory narratives.
Among U. von Brandenburg’s standout works, Le milieu est bleu (2011) merges film-opera and immersive installation. The film, shot at the iconic Théâtre du Peuple in Bussang, Vosges, portrays a fictional micro-society engaged in textile rituals. The immersive exhibition, as part of the work’s ongoing evolution, was installed in Paris’s Palais de Tokyo, and unfurled in its spaces a series of sets and large bolts of colourful fabric for visitors to enter and traverse. It Has a Golden Sun and an Elderly Grey Moon (2016-2017) is a dance-based piece devoted to colour, in which dance and textiles blend into a tactile and visual experience. Die Straße (Street, 2013), a black and white film, follows a group navigating a theatrical street with white facades. As the set’s inhabitants engage in mysterious interactions, an outsider named Marcello repeatedly fails in his attempts to assist the inhabitants of this staged world.

The artist’s videos, often shot in long takes, evoke suspended atmospheres reminiscent of tableaux vivants. Muted or choral, the works explore structures of power and group dynamics, including control and submission within communities, borrowing from the frameworks of cinema, dance, painting and theatre. Textiles are central to U. von Brandenburg’s practice and are omnipresent in her films and installations: coloured fabrics allow her to conjure worlds both autonomous and symbolic, her “soft architectures” are fluid, in motion and ephemeral. The works themselves cycle from film to exhibition, their status changing – set, figure, foreground or background – as part of a continuous logic of transformation.
A dense collection of references to artistic and architectural modernity, popular traditions, magic, fable, fairy tale, carnival and puppet theatre informs the impressive creations of U. von Brandenburg, with their glints of humour and sense of colourful lightness. The artist never fixes a form, instead allowing it to evolve over the course of its presentations. Films are later embodied in exhibitions, objects slip into performances, and the apparent stability of architectural forms gives way to a subtle inversion of values.

U. von Brandenburg has participated in a number of important international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2009), the Whitechapel Gallery in London (2018) and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2020). Her works are held in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Tate Modern in London, the MAMCO in Geneva and the Mudam in Luxembourg. In 2016 she was awarded the Prix Marcel-Duchamp, confirming the importance of her work on the contemporary art scene.

Ida Soulard

Translated from the French by Jesse Rowan.

A biography produced as part of the +1 programme.