To honor Ulrike Rosenbach’s 80th birthday, the ZKM | Karlsruhe is presenting a comprehensive exhibition of the media artist’s work. Ulrike Rosenbach was one of the first artists in Germany to use video as a medium in the early 1970s. In her works, she addresses questions of female identity, gender-specific role attributions, and the holistic relationship between man and nature.
Ulrike Rosenbach’s early performances, in which she works experimentally with the technical possibilities of direct recording, storage and playback of videos, sometimes attaching cameras to her body, received great international recognition. Through her participation in landmark exhibitions such as documenta 6 (1977) and documenta 8 (1987), Rosenbach became the most renowned German performance and video artist of her time.
While still a student at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where she studied sculpture with Norbert Kricke and Joseph Beuys, the artist made the role of women in society her subject. Her hood and collar objects can be understood as symbols of the bondage of a patriarchal form of society. She also takes up this theme in her early video works, which are created as bodily actions without an audience in front of a fixed camera in her studio and with which she questions her role as artist, wife and mother.
Her involvement with the American Women’s Liberation Movement and a teaching position for feminist media art at the renowned California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia/Los Angeles, California, in the mid-1970s strengthened Rosenbach’s feminist approach and led to an expansion of her work: instead of autobiographical themes, the focus is now on female role models and clichés and their cultural transmission. Rosenbach frequently draws on quotations from art history and works with superimpositions of live recordings of herself with images of female figures from mythology, religion, art, and popular culture.
With the advancing possibilities of digital image processing, Ulrike Rosenbach’s videos in the 1980s change into image compositions in which she uses visual effects such as computer-generated image montages and cross-fades. In search of primordial feminine principles and archaic-matriarchal lines of tradition, she increasingly shifts the focus of her works in these years to fundamental aspects of the coexistence of man and nature, the structure of space and time, and the cyclical cycle of becoming and passing away.
In the 1990s, Ulrike Rosenbach created media sculptures in which the far-reaching emancipatory and socio-political contents of her work were plastically condensed. The artist transforms numerous of her performances into complex spatial installations. Her most recent video works are summaries and syntheses of earlier work cycles in which, in addition to image quotations from her own works, she draws on edited sequences from film history and other sources, combining them into atmospherically dense, new image collages.
Since 2018, Ulrike Rosenbach’s video archive, comprising more than 600 analog tapes, has been digitized and processed at ZKM. The retrospective, still initiated by Peter Weibel and created in close collaboration with the artist, draws on the results of this work with more than 120 works – including objects, videos, media installations and sculptures, photographs and drawings from more than five decades.
“Ulrike Rosenbach. today is tomorrow” is thus part of a series of exhibitions at the ZKM honoring the important work of a pioneering generation of media artists. The exhibition is also presented as part of the program focus “Female Perspectives”.
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