Ulrike Ottinger has been internationally recognized as a filmmaker for many years. Her photographic works, created since the beginning of her artistic career and even before her first films, have found their way into important private and public art collections and have met with a very positive resonance that goes beyond the art scene. I am delighted that the extensive exhibition at the Museum für Film und Fernsehen and the comprehensive film retrospective of the Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek in Berlin are offering a wide public the opportunity to become acquainted with the very different facets of Ulrike Ottinger’s oeuvre, which is characterized by a most independent and highly imaginative pictorial language. In a unique manner, the exhibition, conceived in close cooperation with the artist, illustrates how films and photographs complement and enrich one another. In addition, remarkable film scripts and work books, as well as striking film costumes, provide inspiring insights into Ulrike Ottinger’s artistic working process and the almost baroque abundance of her repertoire of characteristic images and forms.
The exhibition, a joint effort of Ulrike Ottinger and Kristina Jaspers of the Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen, shows a representative cross-section of the artist’s photographic work. Using exemplary photographic work from all phases of her oeuvre, the Goethe-Institut’s touring exhibition reflects Ulrike Ottinger’s characteristic juxtaposition of documentary and staged photography, which the art historian Katharina Sykora has concisely captured in the following words: “The found and invented meet in these photos. They are the arenas of alternating change, between reality and fiction, past and future, wish and fulfillment.”
Ulrike Ottinger: Photographer and Filmmaker is an international touring exhibition presented by the Goethe-Institut Manila.
