The Present in Drag, Berlin Biennale
In her performative practice Amalia Ulman exposes how a technocratic and histrionic culture industry requires the performance of an equally contradictory and fabricated persona.
Her new work is both an installation and a performance that takes place in the studio and across the artist’s social media channels.
Having begun in late 2015, it draws on the incongruity of pregnancy with certain labor roles and the art world. The installation features Bob 2.0, a robot based on Bob the Pigeon, a sidekick present in most of the videos and drawings of PRIVILEGE—a pet-friend who becomes Ulman‘s counselor after sneaking into her office and interrupting her productivity.
Whiteness, maleness, verticality, and linearity as the dominant aesthetic of power and legitimacy are dramatized in addition to Ulman’s access to realms and persons of prestige, often at the artist’s own expense and fatigue. The performance suggests that Ulman’s own ability to express and complain carries its own privilege—a position of criticality not accessible to all. Yet she still feels conscious of the few roles available to her in the culture industry, becoming a service worker and caricature of herself all while she carries a metaphorical idea-baby of replication, continuity, and the monopoly of stereotypes.
The installation presented at the BB9 was a real-life sketch of what would be the exhibitions taking place after the conclusion of Privilege, the performance.
It was comprised of three monitors showing videos of Bob, fake endorsements and vine-style clips, a dancer’s pole and an animatronic of Bob de Pigeon and a bunch of red balloons, all of which was contained by four walls covered in grey drapes and sustained by grey carpeted floors.
The Proposal, BB9 Anthem
What if you couldn’t get a biennial out of your head?
One of several popular formats recast for the exhibition is an album in which artists and musicians have been brought together, offering a collaborative and multi-tonal counterpoint to the often hermetic modes of visual production: music as environment and testimony to collaboration and sharing. Anthem is the soundtrack of the 9th Berlin Biennale. Los Angeles based artist and musician Ashland Mines (TOTAL FREEDOM) is the executive producer of the album, cultivating and fostering sets of unlikely collaborations. The album is produced in partnership with The Vinyl Factory. The tracks will be available for streaming on the 9th Berlin Biennale website and as limited 12″ singles on vinyl.