Ulla von Brandenburg

Working in film, photography, installation, and performance, Ulla von Brandenburg appropriates archaic artmaking traditions to investigate the unspoken rules of contemporary society. Von Brandenburg’s complex, eclectic practice also reveals her formal training in set design and her interest in the history of film, photography, theater, and psychology. A favored medium of von Brandenburg is the tableau vivant, or “living picture,” a popular 18th-century combination of art and theater wherein live models are arranged in painterly scenes; she employed this concept for Kugel (2007), filming the reflection of the figures in a curved mirrored ball, even including her own reflection in the composition. For “Wagon Wheel,” a 2009 exhibition, von Brandenburg installed a labyrinth of hanging quilts that referenced the African American patchwork quilts used as symbolic guides on the Underground Railroad.