新世界1717 (New World 1717), Shanghai
New World 1717, the sole live performance component of Privilege, took place at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai as part of the RAM HIGHLIGHT 2017: DISPLACE festival. Performed by the artist alongside pole dancer Valentina Zhang, New World 1717 saw the two enact mostly different performative roles, with Zhang conducting a pole dance on a tall, walking cane-like pole within the space and Ulman alternating between playing the drums and a presentation of spoken word poetry.
Excerpts from 新世界1717 (New World 1717).
For full video documentation email office@suite1717.net
Red dress by HB Peace.
Similarly to AGENDA, the artist’s lecture component to the performance, Ulman’s poems approached the ideas cemented in Privilege from a sort of backstage, alternative perspective, where her relationship to Bob the pigeon isn’t rooted in fiction or fantasy but more along the lines of a real and domestic, human-pet friendship. Similarly, the fictional narrative of an American woman working in an office is supplanted by the concrete one of a newlywed immigrant living in America and her genuine fears of deportation.
Throughout the several acts of the performance, the two performers would at times occupy the pristine, white curtained space simultaneously, while in other moments one would depart the space to leave the other as the sole occupant and “citizen” of the space, all occurring to the hypnotic drudgery of Los Angeles soundscape, from comforting sounds of suburbia and the sea to the bustle of DTLA and the city’s highways.
Red dress by HB Peace.
RAM HIGHLIGHT 2017: DISPLACE
Following the success of the first edition last year, “RAM HIGHLIGHT 2017” continues its exploration of cutting-edge creativity in the fields of contemporary art and culture. Ten artists from around the world (Moriah Evans, Nikima Jagudajev, Nunu Kong, Asad Raza, Rafay Rashid, Mårten Spångberg, Tang Dixin, Amalia Ulman, Andros Zins-Brown) will be invited to present a rich and dynamic configuration of programs in the museum over a relatively short span of a week. “DISPLACE” cannot simply be pigeonholed as exhibition, performance, dance, or theater, yet it encompasses different overlapping layers of visual and audio elements as well as performances. The art project will foster a diverse yet open viewing experience along with myriad means of audience participation with the project’s unique statements and expressions. Through the accumulation of changing temporal and spatial experiences, “DISPLACE” offers up unexpected events that will land everyday in the museum: improvisational activities deriving from sports, dance, music, social media, “eco-care”, family relationships, or even cooking. Moreover, a program running one night through to early dawn—which will allow spectators to follow time’s plunge into darkness—will spark unexpected encounters with the artists and generate much energy and wonder. In formal terms, “DISPLACE” transforms the galleries into a boundary-breaking experimental space. As Larys Frogier, Director of RAM says "The dynamic of change, circulation, activation generated by ‘DISPLACE’ is reinforced by the gathering of a group of artists but it is actually what constitutes the core of ‘DISPLACE’: each artist has conceived a project that often stands within the tension between different art practices, switching social positions and media, creating ambiguous situations where the acts of looking, showing, stating, performing are never forever fixed but always extended, exchanged, mixed, embodied and addressed as a full act of creation and as a necessary process of thinking.”
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