Reputation took place at New Galerie in Paris and took place on the 20th of October - 17th December 2016.

It was curated by Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou.

Reputation, New Galerie, Paris

Room 1: Bob's Office Installation view

Room 1: Bob's Office Installation detail: desk

Room 1: Bob's Office Installation view

♫Room 1: Bob's Office sound piece: city sounds, Parisian jazz radio station♫

Room 1: Bob's Office Installation detail: promotional balloons, handfans and plates from Partido Popular Spain.

Room 1: Bob's Office Installation detail: collection of Anne Fontaine shirts wore during Privilege, the performance, Eiffel Tower shaped vase, giant paper clips, pigeon photoframe, Social Strata Lingerie sets etc.

Room 1: Bob's Office Installation detail: Bob's nest, pigeon tie, office chair.

Room 1: Bob's Office Installation detail: AGENDA's scrip and other trinckets.

Room 1: Bob's Office Installation detail: Bob's family photo album, candid photographs.

Room 1: Bob's Office Installation detail: Collection of conterfeit Prada, Gucci and Miu Miu shoes wore during Privilege, the performance.

Room 1: Bob's Office Installation detail: Pigeon photoframe and whiteboard replica of the one in the DTLA office, backdrop to Privilege, the performance.

Room 1: Bob's Office Installation detail.

Room 2: The Park Installation detail: Sad Girls, 3D printed glazed porcelain.

♫Room 2: The Park sound piece: pigeons socialising♫

Room 2: The Park Installation detail: wall decals, juggling balls, red office carpet tiles, porcelain deflated balloon figurines.

Room 3: Temple of Bob Installation detail: Entrance.

Room 3: Temple of Bob Installation detail

♫Room 3: Temple of Bob sound piece: Bob scatting♫

Room 3: Temple of Bob Installation detail : animatronic of Bob, wooden perch, piece of bread.

Room 3: Temple of Bob Installation detail : animatronic of Bob, wooden perch, piece of bread.

The pioneer of a still loosely defined practice, Amalia Ulman uses social networks as a stage for her performances. From Dowtown Los Angeles, she has began a narrative arc impregnated with false pretenses and strangely familiar twists and turns. Having moved into an office, she discovers herself as a business woman and adopts a pigeon named Bob, a grotesque alter ego. Adept of the paranoiac-critical method, she begins a descent into which the US elections and viral dynamics accumulate in a Piranesi labyrinth of psychoses. Gradually transforming the world into a magnetic field of evidence, her online personae becomes the point where all the evidences of a conspiracy delirium converge.

For her exhibition REPUTATION at New Galerie, Amalia Ulman has transformed each room of the space into a diffracted mirror of her virtual universe. Center of different social mutation and passing process, the first room is the partial reproduction of her office in Los Angeles. Circled with pigeon spikes, it is a highly corrosive mixture of counterfeit items, hermetic symbols, and WASP nostalgia. Downstairs comes a mural about office life obviously inspired by the New Yorker’s cartoons. Small betrayals, low-blows, and Monday morning sadness coexist on a drab, cheap surface of laminated tile and other objects like juggling balls and deflated ballons. From a working class hero, bob transition into a god of sorts. Canonized into an animatronic of himself in a set up of fake luxury….. In this presumably static cabinet, the air becomes scarcer as his conjugal expectations and social ambition increase. Can a feral pigeon become a White Dove? Is the artist a girl, a woman, a mother or a whore? Are we being watched by the paperclip or are we the paperclip?

Text by Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou

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Academia

Other

Publications:

A job is a job is a job

Privilege: The Book

✔Chaoyang Wildlife

 

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