ULLA VON BRANDENBURG
Palais de Tokyo, Paris
February 02 – September 13, 2020

“Fabrics allow me to camouflage, conceal and clad the white cube of a museum, and thus change the system of values and the frameworks of thought. I use fabrics to create spaces in which we can apparently be elsewhere, in other words, fall into other worlds. (…) In a space where curtains have been hung, the separation between the interior and the exterior, or between different worlds, becomes blurred. And that blur makes us wonder where we are.”

For this new exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, Ulla von Brandenburg (born in 1974 in Karlsruhe, lives and works in Paris) has imagined a total, evolving project, inspired from the theatre, as well as its imaginary and conventions. Around the notion of ritual, understood as the possibility to explore the relationships between individuals and groups, and to create or not to create something in common, the artist invites the public to take part in an immersive and renewed experience of the themes, forms and motifs that feed into her work: movement, the stage, colours, music, textiles… Installations, sculptures, performances and films specially conceived for the exhibition answer to one another and tangle together to form an open narration, between authenticity and artifice, the natural world and human activities, the interior and the exterior, fiction and reality.

Ulla von Brandenburg is a German artist born in 1974 in Karlsruhe and based in Paris since 2005. After training as a scenographer in Karlsruhe and a brief period spent in the world of the theatre, she studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg. Her work is characterised by a diversity of means and media (installations, films, watercolours, murals, collages, performances…) 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 psychanalysis, 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.

Her internationally recognised work has appeared in numerous solo shows, recently for example at the MRAC in Sérignan (2019), the Whitechapel Gallery in London (2018), the Musée Jenisch Vevey in Switzerland (2018), the Kunstmuseum in Bonn (2018), the Perez Art Museum in Miami (2016) or the Contemporary Art Museum of Saint Louis (2016). Her works are included in such prestigious collections as the Tate Modern in London, the MAMCO in Geneva, the Centre Pompidou in Paris or the Mudam in Luxembourg. Her work is represented by the Art: Concept gallery in Paris, the Pilar Corrias Gallery in London, the Produzentengalerie in Hamburg and the Meyer Riegger gallery in Karlsruhe and Berlin.


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