Despite working in a wide variety of media including drawing, painting, film, video, installation and performance, Ulla von Brandenburg's work often examines the way in which meaning and significance can be articulated at the borderline between one medium and another. Throughout her practice there is an emphasis on the way in which narrative can be communicated via a static, or seemingly static, representation. For von Brandenburg, a single image can be read as a distillation of many stories and associations: the climax of an accumulation of narratives and temporalities, similar to the way in which Roland Barthes read the photographic image as a site of continuous reinterpretation.

In Untitled (2003), von Brandenburg created a larger than life-size wall painting based on a photograph by pioneer photographer, Henry Peach Robinson. The original photograph, entitled Fading Away (1858), depicts a dying girl surrounded by three grieving members of her family. Von Brandenburg enlarged and abstracted the image, leaving only the whitest areas of the photograph unpainted so as to create a striking negative effect. The figures loom out of the painting, at times reading only as abstract forms. The literal flattening of the image acts as a visual metaphor for the photographic compression of the numerous temporalities that exist within a single frame (coincidentally, Peach Robinson's original photograph is a composite image comprising five different original negatives). Sited on the wall of the gallery, von Brandenburg's image could be read as a filter between the time(s) of the original photograph and the present, a transition emphasised by the medium shift from photography to painting and the layers of process this transition entails.

Ulla von Brandenburg's film and video works display a similarity to her drawings and paintings in the way narrative is implied through the careful placement of independent figures. Shot on Super-8 film, her Tableaux Vivants depict static arrangements of figures that hold their carefully choreographed poses for the length of the roll of film. Occasional movements betray these grainy images as films. The nexus of gazes that temporarily binds the figures together (all of whom are contemporaries of von Brandenburg and recognisable members of Hamburg's artistic milieu) suggests possible relationships and stories between these characters.

For much of her subject matter, Brandenburg frequently returns to the themes of occultism, psychoanalysis and illness, as well as to imagery associated with magic and the circus. Her graphic drawings, made on razor-thin translucent paper, may often depict a ring of figures, taking part in a séance, or a group of doctors examining the unconscious body of an hysterical female patient, taken from the well-known photographs of Jean-Martin Charcot's patients at La Salpêtrière . These scenes are consistently organised around female figures in uncertain or liminal states; women depicted as intermediaries between this world and another. The importance of the context in which images are read is further emphasised through Brandenburg's appropriation of found imagery that resonate with alternative significance once inserted into the context of her own practice.

Andrew Bonacina

Ulla von Brandenburg
Untitled, 2003
Acrylic on wall

Exhibition view Kunstverein Braunschweig