Ulla von Brandenburg explores the forgotten or overlooked histories of literature, theater, architecture and cinema in deeply engaging works that bring historical moments into contemporary  contexts. She works with a range of materials including film, performance, writing, sculpture, sound and set design, often combining these materials into singular immersive installations that transform exhibition sites into theatrical settings. The differences between the real and artificial, the spectator and performer are uncertain. In the upcoming Carpenter Center exhibition The Way We Live Now, Modernist Ideologies at Work, von Brandenburg will reconfigure her installation Singspiel or “song play” for the Le Corbusier building. Originally produced for the 2009 Venice Biennale, Singspiel is a 16-mm film and labyrinthine installation of cloth panels that draws on the history of another Le Corbusier work—Villa Savoye—to explore aspects of staging and theater in connection to the built environments of the famed architect.

Ulla von Brandenburg

Von Brandenburg was born in Karlsruhe, Germany. She studied Scenography and Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe, and continued her studies in fine art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Hamburg. She has had solo exhibitions at the Secession, Vienna; Kunsthaus Hamburg; Pilar Corrias, London; and at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, among others. Her work has been included in biennials in Sydney, Lyon, and Jerusalem, and has also been presented in numerous group exhibitions including Tools for Conviviality, The Power Plant, Toronto; Intense Proximite, Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Performa 07, New York; and The World as a Stage at the Tate Modern. She lives and works in Paris and Hamburg.