The artist’s staged scenes and constructed environments at VISUAL, Carlow map the past to find alternative paths to the future
Asked in an interview which category best suited his books – memoir, travel, fiction, history or another – the late W.G. Sebald answered “all the categories”. Fellow German Ulla von Brandenburg might, if so prompted, express similarly teasing resistance to being creatively boxed in. Her exhibitions can comprise, all at once, theatre, dance, film, sculpture, drawing, painting and more – each element gesturing towards moments, major and minor, in the history of these disciplines. Von Brandenburg is a cultivated time-traveller, knowledgeably collecting and combining recherché references to artistic styles from multiple periods and places: pairing, for instance, concepts from modern dance with principles from Greek theatre, or using 1960s Super 8 film technology to capture performances based on nineteenth-century tableaux vivants. Her staged scenes and constructed environments are nonetheless both retrospective and speculative. Gathering souvenirs of high-cultural and countercultural histories, reflecting on diverse visions of coming-together and coexisting through art, she maps the past to find alternative paths to the future.
At VISUAL, von Brandenburg is accompanied by an evolving troupe of performers – longstanding associates and locally recruited fellow travellers with whom she develops, in a multitude of forms, artfully stylised experiments in choreography and dramatic interaction. Bringing together new and preexisting work, Under Water Ball is a combination of live performance, film and sculptural installation, themed around visions of an imaginary subaquatic community. Huge fabric hangings fill the high-and-wide main gallery, individual textile pieces from 2019–24 repurposed as a loosely unified composition. These draped curtains – some in a strong, single colour (orange, purple, yellow), others decorated with expressively painted abstract shapes (their patterning and palette paying tribute to the geometric designs of Sonia Delaunay, a key aesthetic influence) – brightly designate a space of unspecified play: part theatre-stage, part circus-tent. Around us and above us, the luminous fabrics form unemphatic enclosures containing pure-white sculptures, including sticks, hoops, a ball; props, perhaps, for past or impending action: tools for acrobats or actors, dancers or magicians. (Early in the show’s run, the exhibition’s mise-en-scène became the setting for group performances: nine players in antiquated theatrical costume enacting slow, swaying, gentle movements, punctuated with intermittent musical refrains, simple tune-fragments on flutes, fiddles and more, improvised with purposeful naivety.)
At the rear of the gallery, the operatic film Un bal sous l’eau (Under Water Ball, 2023) portrays the collective’s core group of regular actors readying themselves for, then participating in, a play centred on the titular undersea event: a celebration of death-defying existence beneath the waves, explored through song and puppetry. As they prepare, the players sing to each other of what acting means, weighing the value of wearing a mask, becoming a character. Pinned to the dressing room wall, a playbill announcing a production of Hamlet underscores this investment in theatrical artifice (‘the play’s the thing…’). (Hamlet, additionally, was by some accounts first staged at sea.) And yet this allusion to a work of tragedy is in some ways a sly misdirection. If there is, occasionally, a studied solemnity to some of von Brandenburg’s dramatic situations – characters in Un bal sous l’eau muse on ageing and lost love – her artistic worldbuilding is equal parts comic too. The daftness of dreaming of a life underwater – among much else, we hear songs delighting in the irrelevance of dishwashers and umbrellas, or exalting the powerful sexual pleasures of aquatic society – is indicative of an enduring, ebullient openness to the absurd. We share with her the awareness that the ‘under water ball’ is a foolish fantasy: just like, perhaps, any number of earlier utopian or avant-gardist pipe dreams. But, as von Brandenburg’s art suggests, through the buoyancy and joyful purpose of its imaginative questing, such fantasies might yet contain undiscovered treasure.
Under Water Ball at VISUAL, Carlow, 6 June – 25 August
