ULRIKE OTTINGER: SESSIONS
Exhibition and Film Retrospektive
In parallel to the Bildarchive exhibition at Kunst-Werke, photographs by Ulrike Ottinger were presented at the Contemporary Fine Arts gallery under the title Sessions. Whilst the former exhibition consisted of pictures taken before and during the making of her feature films and documentaries, the focus at the latter was on portraits and the photo novelas Ottinger conceived in the 1970s and 1980s: sequences of events condensed into single images.
"Every one of the thousands of photographs (...) is a first picture. It always refers to something beyond itself: to the reality that preceeds it; to countless images from the repositories of the arts, of everyday cultures and of myth; and to the visual cosmos of her own increasingly dense oeuvre. These photographs are encounters between things found and things invented. They are arenas in which reality and fiction, past and future, wish and fulfilment, transform each other."
(Katharina Sykora, "Stills and Sessions", in: Ulrike Ottinger: Sessions, hg. von / ed. by Contemporary Fine Arts, Köln / Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König 2001)
Film Retrospektive
11.-28. February 2001
Berliner Filmkunsthaus Babylon
Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse 30, 10178 Berlin
and
02.-31. March 2001
Kino Arsenal im Filmhaus am Potsdamer Platz
Potsdamer Strasse 2, 10785 Berlin
Catalogue with a text by Katharina Sykora
WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION:
Black-and-white and colour portraits of Tabea Blumenschein, Valeska Gert, Eddie Constantine, Veruschka von Lehndorff et al. (1975-1979); Photo novelas from the contexts of the films: Bildnis einer Trinkerin. Aller - Jamais Retour / Ticket of No Return (1979), Dorian Gray und Spiegel der Boulevardpresse / Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press (1983); Scripts and workbooks from the contexts of the films Bildnis einer Trinkerin. Aller - Jamais Retour / Ticket of No Return (1979), Dorian Gray und Spiegel der Boulevardpresse / Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press (1983), Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia (1988).