calendario eventi  :: 

X

27/5/2008

Ulla von Brandenburg

Irish Museum of Modern Art - IMMA, Dublin

curated by Rachael Thomas

The first solo exhibition in Ireland by one of Germany’s most innovative contemporary artists, Ulla von Brandenburg, presents new and recent works that explore recurring themes and new subject matter through a wide range of media including film, drawing, installation and performance. Brandenburg’s practice reflects her training in set design and the visual arts and is inspired by a wide range of historical elements, many reverting back to the late 19th-centruy, sourced from literature, the visual arts, expressionist theatre, Hollywood films, photography, chess and magic, as well as pre-Freudian psychoanalysis.

The title of the exhibition, Whose beginning is not, nor end cannot be, is taken from the work Angel-talks by Magus John Dee (1527 - 1609), a noted mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, occultists and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I. As the title suggests, many of Brandenburg’s installations present uncertainty. It is never clear whether the show is over, or whether the performance has just begun. The exhibition is structured into four different chapters. Moving through the exhibition space each chapter explores recurring themes and images which relates to one another. In the first chapter the newspaper magazine IV, 2008, acts like an archive of Brandenburg’s collected images and is surrounded by drawings relating to them and other images in the exhibition. Leading into the next chapter the film Geist (Ghost), 2007, explores themes of past and present, life and death and reality and illusion. In the second chapter a wall drawing, specially designed for IMMA, Forest, 2008, of a forest by night covers all four walls. Inside this dark space only the long trunks of the trees are visible, enclosed in the space visitors are brought into another world where the inside becomes outside and day becomes night. In the third chapter the installation Karo Sieben (Seven of Diamonds), 2007, comprises a chess-board with various props, made to give the illusion of perspective it acts like an empty theatre stage where anything can happen. In the final chapter the new film work 8, 2007, refers to Brandenburg’s adaptation of the the tableaux vivants from earlier works but approaches them in a new way.

Born in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1974, Ulla von Brandenburg currently lives and works in Hamburg and Paris. Recent solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, 2008; Project PS1, New York; Art: Concept, Paris, 2007; Produzentengalerie, Hamburg, 2007; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2006, and Kunsthalle, Zürich, 2006. Group exhibitions in 2008 include Biennale’s in Jerusalem, Bucharest and Sydney; in 2007 group exhibitions include Performa 07, New York; The World as a Stage, Tate Modern, London; Against Time, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; 3rd Prague Biennial, Prague, and Pale Carnage, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol.

An illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition which includes an interview with the artist by Rachael Thomas, texts by curator and critic Beatrix Ruf and writer and artist Declan Long, and a foreword by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA.

The exhibition is supported by the Goethe-Institut Dublin.


Irish Museum of Modern Art - IMMA
Royal Hospital Military Road Kilmainham 8 - Dublin
Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday: 10.00am - 5.30pm; except Wednesday: 10.30am - 5.30pm; Sundays and Bank Holidays: 12 noon - 5.30pm; Late opening on Thursday evenings until 8.00pm from 5 June - 18 September; Mondays: Closed

stampa

permanent link