Ulu Braun: Speech to the living species

Almost anyone who takes a little trouble can put two unrelated images together for an effect that is amusing or disturbing, or both. However, the perfect collage, like the perfect crime, is the one that goes undetected.

Ulu Braun’s collages have a distinctive delicacy, a beauty of touch and tone and a hairline precision that is best studied at first hand and in close-up. At his disposal he has such a wide spectrum of expressions (be it in the form of film, photo or digital animation combined with comparably classic media such as drawing or painting) that his pictorial fancies flow lightly and freely. Ulu Braun masters merging the wildest incongruities to a higher logic, and by this means seems to reorder the experiences of every day.

A wonderful example is his surrealistic collage ‘Speech to the living species’ from 2009 where the viewer naturally accepts the leadership of a ball of wool over a Mass celebrated by a crowd of men dressed in white assisted by hairy creatures, probably bottle brushes. Likewise, in the collage ‘Sprenger’ (2009) the photo-fragment of a huge portion of Vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce doubles as a Mediterranean cliff. Visitors to Braun’s last exhibition in Brussels will recall that the little Rhabarber Boy was living in a jungle formed of giant rhubarb trunks and leaves. All these and many other images become part of the furniture of our imagination from the moment we set eyes on them.

To an astonishing degree, Braun doesn’t repeat himself – largely as a result of the enormous amount of material that he is using. In the video loop ‘Westcoast’, featured in the upcoming exhibition, there are more than 1000 different extracts of film and photography that he has transformed into an exuberant and eccentric panorama of a virtual coastline, explored in a slow camera-tour from left to right. Scenes of high drama are matched with wild fantasies that are all his own. This westcoast is brilliant in colour, clear and crisp in its pictorial idiom and marked by a high degree of apparent coherence. Here again, Braun’s visual adventure challenges our everyday experience.

With his participation at this year’s Videonale 12 exhibition at Kunstmuseum Bonn, Ulu Braun is the only artist whose video work has featured in three consecutive editions of this prestigious Biennial. His films have been presented at international film festivals in Berlin, Paris, Oberhausen, Tampere, Graz, Seoul and Kyoto among others. As part of the group Ykon he will participate at this year’s Athens Biennial. Ulu Braun was born in Schongau, Germany, in 1976 and currently lives and works in both Berlin and Helsinki. He first studied Painting and Experimental film in Vienna and then Animation film at Babelsberg Film University in Potsdam, Germany.

Ulu Braun
Speech to the living species