AMALIA ULMAN PRESS ARCADIAMISSA.COM 14-16 BREWER STREET, FIRST FLOOR [email protected] LONDON , W1F 0SG https://www.academia.edu/33147127/Fake_It_Until_You_Make_It_Amalia_Ulmans_Recent_Work Amalia Ulman’s new solo show at London’s Arcadia Missa in Peckham, entitled “Labour Dance,” is at first very charming: Red balloons filled with helium and tied to sparkling ribbons crowd the ceiling, which, paired with dim lighting and two small flickering TV screens, set the room alight in a soft pink glow. 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 beautifully crafted ceramic balloons, which upon first glance seem simply deflated and old, randomly scat- tered across the floor. The installation acts a continuation of “Privilege,” a work commissioned for the 9th 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 up by sheer white curtains, and it is as though the scene is set in a rather expensive corporate office on Madison Avenue. Replete with skyscraper views and an ironic ’70s black-and-white chequered floor, it is a nod, perhaps, 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 bouquet of balloons in a shiny steel elevator, taking a video selfie in its opening doors. In another scene, Ulman, sat upon a swivel chair, slides in and out of an office lobby arms raised in the air, a large smile plastered across 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 hu- mor 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 girls, “As a first-year student on the Goldsmiths Fine Art BA, it is almost a prerequisite to be totally ob- 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. Related: Kanye West Joins Instagram, But Is It Art? 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 media channels, as well as through her works spanning film, poetry, video essay, and collage. Her Insta- 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 the floor. But there is of course the subtext of celebrity, and of identification, which Ulman handles effortlessly—her 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 While questions of her pregnancy circled the gallery floor, it is exactly in such detail that her work delivers 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 my office in Downtown LA and who stayed until becoming a very important character in the story.” 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- nancy test. There, against ceiling tiles featuring an idyllic image of blue skies and fluffy clouds, was a clear 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 that seemed to reflect her new life in Los Angeles: breaking up with a boyfriend, becoming a “sugar baby” 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 also anger and bewilderment — for some who were embroiled in Ulman’s five-month hell-and-back confes- sional it was not a performance but a lie. Now, as she prepares to open a new show at the increasingly influential Arcadia Missa gallery in Peckham, Ulman is again prompting debate below the line. The pregnancy test shot has been followed by a number of selfies featuring her growing bump. On March 26 she posed at a baby shower in Buenos Aires with her Argentinian grandmother; on September 16 she appeared with eight arms in a red dress, two of them cra- dling her belly, the others holding various office items, like a workplace Hindu goddess Durga. 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 non-pregnant Ulman as she sits in an office at Arcadia Missa. The 27-year-old is over from Los Angeles to 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 earli- er 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: a YouTube trend in which pregnant women record themselves dancing to induce labour. Balloons will float about in the installation, set against wallpaper featuring clichéd stock images of the New York skyline. “I’ve heard my mum saying all her life how her tits look like deflated balloons because of me — that’s how women write about it in a lot of blogs and things like that,” she explains. “That idea of the tight balloon and deflated balloon is very female-body-related.” 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 disability, so if I get tired doing nothing, basically, how could I have a kid?” That disability relates to a bus crash Ulman was in as she travelled from New York to Chicago in 2013.