Ulla von Brandenburg, It has a Golden Yellow Sun and Elderly Grey Moon

Ulla von Brandenburg works in a diverse range of media to create complex, multi-layered narratives that investigate the thresholds that exist between reality and artifice. Working with film; drawing; installation, and performance, von Brandenburg engages with popular cultural forms from multiple epochs as a means through which to explore contemporary collective experience. Working within seemingly archaic traditions such as the tableau vivant, von Brandenburg appropriates historical source material and transforms it into the present to tacitly reveal the rules that govern our social reality.

It Has a Golden Orange Sun and an Elderly Blue Moon, Ulla von Brandenburg's first solo exhibition in Canada, along with It Has a Golden Red Sun and an Elderly Green Moon at The Power Plant, brings together five recurring themes in her work: colour, ritual, movement, stairs, and textiles. Here, the inspiration around these themes is drawn from the architecture of modern theatre and Adolphe Appia's stage designs, the dances of Rudolf Laban and the Judson Dance Theater, the work on movement by Samuel Beckett, and John Cage's musical constructions on randomness.

The exhibition unfolds in a large installation conceived on site, operating as stage set and sculpture at once, and in a film—two elements that echo one another, like a mirror and its reflection. The spectator is invited to literally become an integral part of the apparatus deployed in the space of the Fonderie Darling and The Power Plant; projected into the film, one finds oneself immersed in a physical and aesthetic experience, caught up in the film's images and the scenographic setting.

The film It Has a Golden Sun and an Elderly Grey Moon (2016) takes place on the stage of Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre, France. This space is structured by two large staircases that serve as a platform. Comprised of different levels, the staircase is a means of architecturally representing hierarchies in space, and in the various actions taking place there, which are embodied by dancers’ simple movements and handling coloured pieces of cloth. The staircase mirrors the place occupied by the spectators, from whence they are observing the action of the film; it plays the role of the stage.