#63: Ulu Braun

Ulu Braun has been using the medium of video to explore the field between the visual arts and auteur cinema since 1997. He is one of the key figures who have transferred painting into video art and have played a significant role in defining and  further developing the genre of video collage.

Ulu Braun presents:

Westcoast, 2009, 7:20 min
Westcoast is a panorama-video consisting of interwoven scenes mounted on a coastline – somewhere between Rotterdam and Sydney. Starting from a bubbling primordial soup, the view incessantly pans along an waterfront in the style of a late transnational financial eclecticism and passes by mystical events, such as a giant hippo eating carrots and hectically spinning rubber boats. After a dark spiritual waterway recalling mideval atmospheres, the panorama ends in a cave encommpassing a refuse-Jacuzzi in which a white woman gazes about with melancholy. – Fouad Asfour

Vertikale, 2013, 11:30 min
Vertikale takes us up and away into a hyper-real world of appropriated TV and documentary imagery. This video-collage physically engages the viewer as vertical film shots are merged and mounted to mediate a symbolic journey from the depths of the sea to the peaks of human civilization. Life and the ambition to survive are reflected along a geographical and media-referential line. – HEK, Basel

Birds, 2014, 14:55 min
A mesmerizing Hitchcockian visual study in ornithology, BIRDS, by visual artist Ulu Braun breaks down societal construction, hinting at a dormant danger: he observes Earth’s winged inhabitants from up close, looking at their ominous and omniscient presence that watches over us in quiet surveillance. Associative editing brings out the sinuous elegance of the creatures, placing them against the glamour and refuse of cities shaped by human civilization. A cohabitation of prehistoric lineage estranged by an abstract soundtrack, this unlikely pairing of fowl and man becomes a premonitory reminder of the fallacy of modern civilization’s progress. – Andrei Tănăsescu

Architektura, 2015, 15:00 min
In the beginning there was a brick, which flew through space. It flew past skyscrapers in a city and keeps reappearing in this film about construction and destruction. Brick by brick – where will that ultimately lead? A father shows the world to his child – that will be all yours one day, he says. Soap bubbles float upward. It is all a cyclical affair. The tableaux Ulu Braun assembles are playful, associative and powerful. In his realm of imagery, sizes, relations and contexts become malleable. Owing to the deconstruction of proportions and coherencies, Ulu Braun’s narrative becomes a fable. Architecture is the game of positioning bodies in light. Darkness needs its space. The future is already misaligned. – Berlinale. Internationals Filmfestspiele Berlin

 

Ulu Braun (b. 1976 in Schongau, Germany) studied painting and experimental film at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna  and animation  at the Film and Television University Konrad Wolf in Potsdam. His works have been shown at KW Berlin, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Young Projects L.A., Shedhalle Zürich, MARTa Herford,  Museo de Reina Sofia Madrid, Berlinische Galerie, Hirshhorn  Museum Washington D.C. , Museum  der Moderne Salzburg, LISTE 18 Basel, Kunsthalle Wien etc. Ulu Braun is a member of the art collectives BitteBitteJaJa and YKON. Braun lives and works in Berlin.

Ulu Braun’s web site: www.ulubraun.com