Amalia Ulman Press

AMALIA ULMAN PRESS ARCADIAMISSA.COM 35 DUKE STREET [email protected] LONDON , W1U 1LH https://www.academia.edu/33147127/Fake_It_Until_You_Make_It_Amalia_Ulmans_Recent_Work Related: What to See in London During Frieze Week Designed as a durational piece, each element on display is part of the larger installation, including several - Berlin Biennale and that was available to view online earlier this year. Related: Instagram Sensation Amalia Ulman on the Difference Between Fact and Fiction “Labour Dance” gets its name from the trend of women dancing vigorously to induce labor, and its accompanying text is a series of comments from online forums about the same. (“I danced to get to 5 cm (cervical dilation) I put on tyga rack city and went crazy lol also a great way to squeeze in exercise :)” writes a user in an excerpt from a group chat on the website whattoexpect.com.) Lining Arcadia Missa’s cavernous walls are large photographs of the New York City skyline, only slightly covered to the open-plan, “fail harder” work cultures of recent years. In one of the TV screens we have Ulman herself, in a red dress bearing the swell of a pregnant belly, holding a her face. The artist is delightfully funny, humor delivered with a cheeky smile and an arm cocked jauntily over hip, without need for any Keaton-esque clumsiness or chaos. Viewers laugh out loud, as they do when Snapchats of pigeons with large heads totter across the screen, or when Ulman launches plastic water bottles with the hope of landing them perfectly upright every time. In this, there is a certain lightness to her work that allows for humor to seep in without pretension or cliché. At the opening, with the promise of seeing Ulman herself, the gallery space spilled over with excited young - sessed with Amalia and her work,” declared one to artnet News. What is almost immediately clear is the intimacy generated between Ulman and her fans, following her, as they do, very closely on social media. Dressed on the night in a long red coat and red platform boots, Ulman is stunning, standing out from the crowd with a shy and endearing charm. There is of course a discrepancy—and one that is easy to con- fuse—between Ulman herself and her on-screen performance, which plays out through her various social - gram is most famous of all, visited by followers upwards of 126,000, which was featured in the work Experi- ences & Perfections at the Tate Modern’s “Performing for The Camera” group show this year. In a sense, Ulman has pioneered the use of social media as performance, as total artwork, and juxtaposes this contemporaneity with the use of nostalgic objects, like the chunky TV screens placed at random upon position of access and privilege is highlighted by her mocking tone, and her delight in indulging the erratic. Ulman is entirely aware that it is indeed her privilege to be in a position to critique and complain, and in doing so she exposes the political lines that are ultimately marshalled by the art world in its entirety. Related: The Guerrilla Girls Size Up Europe at London’s Whitechapel Gallery its poignant punch: as viewers, we are too often engaged in the confusion of the public and the private per- sona, something Ulman negotiates with the introduction of her “pet” pigeon Bob. In an interview with artnet earlier this year, she explained Bob’s appearance in her art, saying “I’m currently working on a narrative where I developed a character for myself, based on people’s projections and precon- ceptions about me, and I also developed the role of a sidekick and counselor, a pigeon that sneaked into Related: Internet Cool Kids Amalia Ulman, Ryder Ripps, Petra Cortright Top Forbes’s 30 Under 30 List Amalia Ulman and Bob the Pigeon. Image Courtesy @amaliaulman Instagram. “Labour Dance” is ultimately a critique of the aesthetics of power and position, and for this, it has developed its own special language and performative play. It is most effective in highlighting that the critical position it occupies it not accessible to all, and set deep under the rumbling railways arches of a fast-gentrifying Peck- ham, the irony is not lost on many. In February, the artist Amalia Ulman posted to her 125,000 Instagram followers a picture of a home preg- message: a plus sign. Ulman’s message below the image read: “BOOM haha.” Her followers had grown used to provocative posts. In April 2014 Ulman began posting a series of images escort, having a boob job and drug-taking, before redemption through a new relationship, meditation and yoga. But in September that year she announced that it was all a performance. This prompted delight but - sional it was not a performance but a lie. Ulman is again prompting debate below the line. The pregnancy test shot has been followed by a number Argentinian grandmother; on September 16 she appeared with eight arms in a red dress, two of them cra- Many followers take Ulman’s pregnancy at face value, wishing her congratulations, asking the due date. Others, though, are steamed up by her artistic use of social media: “Faking pregnant really isn’t cool,” said one, with a thumbs down emoji; “#Faker”, admonished another. The pregnancy is “not really about a baby, it has more to do with the replication of self, and the idea of being pregnant with yourself, basically. But for a while people didn’t know if it was real or not,” says a very install the exhibition and it’s a return home of sorts: though she was born in Buenos Aires and grew up in Gijón, Spain, she studied at Central St Martins art college as a teenager and began her career here. When she showed some of the pregnancy images in her installation at the prestigious Berlin Biennale earlier this year she “left it up to the audience to believe whatever they wanted to”. This is a key theme of these works: the way we construct our online identities. “No one ever really tells the truth online. But there’s this feeling that we should — that by not being true it’s less enjoyable in some way.” Her new show is called Labour Dance. Again its title results from Ulman’s fascination with the online world: about in the installation, set against wallpaper featuring clichéd stock images of the New York skyline. women write about it in a lot of blogs and things like that,” she explains. “That idea of the tight balloon and Thinking about pregnancy has led her to explore her “own desire” for it, she says, but also to consider the complications, of being unable to get pregnant because of work and travelling. “And also because I have a That disability relates to a bus crash Ulman was in as she travelled from New York to Chicago in 2013. Her legs were crushed and she was airlifted to hospital. She continues to bear the scars today. The accident inspired a poem and sound work, which formed part of a Geneva exhibition — which she directed from her hospital bed. “People say ‘Oh, you probably weren’t that sick because you made art’, but no — I made art because it made me feel better,” she recalls. “I have to plan things more ahead and have people helping me more.” And Ulman does a lot of preparation. For all the apparent randomness of her Instagram feed, for instance, she says that “with the performances I always have a script”. She wanted the work to be like a caricature of herself and she knew that she wanted a sidekick, so that the performance was “more like old theatre, or silent movies, more exaggerated: ‘This is a performance! This is Her sidekick is Bob, a pigeon. “I didn’t even care about pigeons — I don’t like birds. And I think that’s a challenge that I introduce into my work: I work with things I don’t necessarily like and then learn to like - Ulman’s Instagram posts involving her feathered friend show this change in her affections. there she is with Bob on Valentine’s Day, on a split-screen, harmonising with herself as she sings the chorus to a Pixies hit: Charles Barsotti. He even lives with Ulman and her boyfriend in LA. can be my son, he can be God, he can be my boyfriend — he can be all of these things.” In another solo exhibition, opening in Paris later this month, Ulman will explore “how Bob went from being a disgusting pigeon to being an art object”, she says. The performance has a distinct colour scheme — palpable when you see her Instagram posts in a grid — that evokes “old-school corporate America” and brands the performance, she says. Working from a studio And that in turn has inevitably led her to the US presidential election. “The election has been very important for the whole performance,” she says. She’s fascinated that it’s Hillary, who are educated and read the New Yorker, and ‘white trash’. It was impossible for me to ignore that, because of the different material, like people using memes for politics, which is crazy.” The performance will end as the election is won and lost. Among the ugliest material she has found online is in the material posted by “alt-Right” commentators: the Drumpf supporters who are among the most worthy candidates for Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” tag. “I was interested in the alt-Right and the aesthetics they use to communicate: the anti-feminist memes, the ‘feminist cancer’, all this stuff,” Ulman explains.

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