Ulay

Depart Foundation announced today that it will present Ulay: The Animist, its first solo exhibition and the first West Coast presentation for German artist Frank Uwe Laysiepen, known by his pseudonym - Ulay (b.1943). The exhibition is curated by Maria Rus Bojan.

This landmark exhibition highlights key features of his oeuvre, unfolding the main trajectories that draw on his performances and photographic works. A pioneer of body art, performance art and Polaroid photography, Ulay is well known for Relation Works – his collaborative period with Marina Abramović, between the years 1976 and 1988. Recently, Ulay’s individual work achieved newfound attention, culminating with the 2016 retrospective exhibitions at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Nederlandse Fotomuseum, Rotterdam and GNYP Gallery Berlin.

The Animist unfolds Ulay’s individual oeuvre by exploring the hidden connections between seemingly disparate aspects of his work and his passionate life. The exhibition traces the genealogy of Ulay’s self-performative Polaroid photography from the early 1970s to the life size experiments he conducted with large format Polaroid technique in the 1990s. This presentation also includes photographic documentations of his travels throughout China and Australia, bringing together a body of works that truly reflects the artist’s underlying preoccupation with the expression of reality in its most immediate and intense form.

The show takes its title The Animist from a 1995 performance of the same name, in which Ulay tests the boundaries of perception and public participation through a subversive combination of sounds and ritual gestures. Considering the metaphor of “the animist” as the most appropriate expression of the core of Ulay’s work – a figure that joins together and reconfigures the relation between the spiritual and material world – the exhibition invites viewers to discover the artist’s intense experiences and insights into what constitutes Reality.

Ulay’s commitment to showing life in its most basic, raw, and truthful form poses an existential and ethical dimension, where the Polaroid is the preferred medium to embody his take on reality by capturing the image’s process of becoming. At a retrospective glance, these images stand out through a personal aesthetic purged of emotion and stylistic artifices. They go beyond the crust of conventional thought in order to penetrate at the heart of what constitutes subjective reality, thus encouraging us to fundamentally reconsider our relationship with ourselves and with the world.

Ulay is the pseudonym of Frank Uwe Laysiepen. He was born in 1943 in Solingen, Germany. Ulay was formally trained as a photographer, and between 1968 and 1971, he worked extensively as a consultant for Polaroid. In the early period of his artistic activity (1968–1976) he explored identity and the body through a series of Polaroid photographs, aphorisms, and intimate performances. At that time, Ulay's photographic approach was becoming increasingly performative and resulted in performative photography (FOTOTOT, 1976). From 1976 to 1988, he collaborated with Marina Abramović on numerous performances; their work focused on questioning perceived masculine and feminine traits and pushing the physical limits of the body (Relation Works). After the break with Marina, Ulay focused on photography, addressing the position of the marginalized individual in contemporary society and re-examining the problem of nationalism and its symbols (Berlin Afterimages, 1994–1995). Nevertheless, although he was working primarily in photography, he remained connected to the question of the 'performative', which resulted in his constant 'provocation' of audiences through numerous performances, workshops and lecture-performances. In recent years, Ulay is mostly engaged in projects and artistic initiatives that raise awareness, enhance understanding and appreciation of, and respect for, water (Earth Water Catalogue, 2012). Ulay's work, as well as his collaborative work with Marina Abramović, is featured in many collections of major art institutions around the world such as Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Centre Pompidou Paris; Museum of Modern Art New York.

Maria Rus Bojan is an international curator and art advisor based in Amsterdam. Bojan works closely with the German performance artist Ulay, writing, curating, and producing materials for several international exhibitions such as Ulay’s first major retrospective, GEN.E.T.RATION ULTIMA RATIO, (2005), at Centro Parraga, Murcia, Spain, Ich bin Ich, (2013), Salon Dahlmann, Berlin, and Body of Pain, Body of Love, Body of Wisdom, (2016) at GNYP Gallery Berlin, while contributing to his recent retrospectives at Nederlandse Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, (2016). In 2014, she published Ulay’s first monograph: Whispers, Ulay on Ulay, at Valiz Amsterdam, awarded the Special Prize for Publications of the Dutch Section at the International Association of Art Critics in 2015.

Maria Rus Bojan's curatorial activity also includes several notable exhibitions such as: Re:Location & Shake,( 2002-2004), OK Centrum for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria/ Casino Luxembourg/ National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; Ready Media, (2008), Nederlandse Instituut voor Media Kunst, Amsterdam/The Contemporary Art Museum, Belgrade; Locked-In, (2008), Casino de Luxembourg; The Fracture at MNAC Bucharest (2015). She has been a curator of Performing History, the Romanian Pavilion for the 54th edition of the International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia (2011). Bojan publishes extensively on contemporary art and is a regular contributor to Sinteza Magazine, and to the online platform Versopolis.