Rostros, objetos encontrados y jinetes rudos

Ulrike Ottinger

Exposición: Jul 8 – Sep 12, 2004


Para reunir material para Rostros, Objetos encontrados y Jinetes rudos, Ulrike Ottinger asistió a festivales, procesiones y eventos culturales en San Antonio y sus alrededores, tomando más de 800 fotografías en el camino. La instalación presenta retratos fotográficos y efímeros de la zona para investigar los fundamentos y prácticas de las culturas locales.

Presidiendo la galería hay una fotografía monumental en blanco y negro de una charreada, un rodeo mexicano. Ottinger captura al vaquero y su lazo en el aire en una imagen familiar del oeste. Nueve fotografías más pequeñas flanquean el mural central e incluyen retratos espontáneos y espontáneos, así como una imagen solitaria de un lujoso corazón rojo con alas angelicales.

Ottinger importa el motivo de esta “reliquia” local en los otros objetos de la galería al incluir corazones y coronas de plumas en fotografías, marcos e incluso un novillo de cuernos largos. Estas áreas parecidas a santuarios de objetos encontrados y alterados —principalmente muestras simbólicas de las culturas nativa americana y mexicana— unifican el proyecto y arrojan dudas sobre la supuesta autenticidad de las fotografías circundantes. Se exhibe el cuaderno de bocetos de Ottinger para el proyecto, una especie de guión gráfico que yuxtapone dibujos con imágenes, notas y postales etnográficas de las décadas de 1930 y 1940.

La forma similar a un álbum de recortes de Caras, Objetos encontrados y Rough Riders es apropiada. La instalación es en gran parte un relato de la exploración de Ottinger de San Antonio, un lugar rico en la criolización de las culturas alemana, española y nativa americana. El proyecto revela no solo cómo el medio de la fotografía puede documentar y manipular simultáneamente a sus sujetos, sino también las formas en que las culturas cambian, influyen y toman prestados elementos entre sí. A través de convincentes yuxtaposiciones, este trabajo, como los otros de Ottinger, expone las complejidades en las nociones de diferencia cultural.

Artista

Ulrike Ottinger

Berlin, Germany

Ulrike Ottinger began experimenting with collage, performance, and photography in the 1960s before turning primarily to film toward the end of the decade. Since then she has produced eighteen cinematic works and countless photographs. Consistently playing with conventions of modernism and the classical avant-garde, she nurtures traces of the familiar and the unfamiliar, the real and the fantastic, allowing each to seamlessly intermingle with the others.
Many of Ottinger’s films explore issues of metamorphosis and inclusion. In Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press (1984) protagonist Dr. Frau Mabuse uses the power of prohibition to make and break the character of Dorian Gray, who ultimately undergoes a transformation from Bauhaus-dandy to evil tycoon. Ottinger complicates such familiar themes by reversing dominant gender roles and manipulating key transformative moments.
Ottinger has increasingly turned toward cultural studies, employing more documentary strategies in her photographs and films. In the film Exile Shanghai (1997) Ottinger documents the stories of six German, Austrian, and Russian Jews whose lives intersect when they flee to Shanghai. Employing interviews, narrative, photographs, and other documentation, the film capitalizes on the tension between art and ethnography.
Ulrike Ottinger was born in Konstanz, Germany in 1942. She has had solo exhibitions at such venues as National Museum Center of Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2004); Witte de With, Bild-Archive, Rotterdam, Holland (2004); The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, IL (2003); and Goethe Institut, Barcelona, Spain (2002). Group exhibitions include Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (2002); Sessions, Bild-Archive, Museum of Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany (2001); and 39th Venice Biennale, Italy (1980).

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Curador

Ute Meta Bauer

Vienna, Austria

Ute Meta Bauer was appointed Professor of Theory, Practice, and Mediation of Contemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 1996 and since 2003 is also vice rector for international relations at the academy. In addition to her faculty position, Bauer is the founding Director of the Office For Contemporary Art Norway in Oslo, and was recently appointed Artistic Director for the 3rd Berlin Biennial For Contemporary Art which will open February 2004.   Recently, Bauer was part of the curatorial team for Documenta11 (2002).
Focusing on art, architecture and sound linked to feminist and socio-political discourses, Bauer’s curatorial work includes the exhibition First Story – Women Building/New Narratives for the 21st Century (2001) for the European Cultural Capital.  That same year she also curated the exhibition Architectures of Discourse for the Fundació Antoni Tapiès in Barcelona.  From 1994 to 1996 Bauer was guest curator for NowHere at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk (1996), and was Artistic Director at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart e.V. from 1990 to 1994, she has also been responsible for numerous exhibitions, lectures and international conferences such as Radical Chic (1993) and A New Spirit in Curating“ (1992).
Since 1985, Bauer has also worked as free-lance curator and editor of publications in the field of contemporary art and mediation of art, among them Education, Information, Entertainment: New Approaches in Higher Artistic Education (Vienna 2001) and periodicals like META 1 – 4 (Stuttgart 1992-94) and case (Barcelona 2001, Porto 2002).

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