This summer, the Yuchengco Museum is the host of a traveling exhibit from Germany that pays tribute to one of its most headstrong filmmakers, Ulrike Ottinger. Entitled Ulrike Ottinger: Photo Exhibition, the exhibit will be accompanied by Ottinger’s latest film “Under Snow” and will be on view at Yuchengco Museum from April 11 to May 10, 2013.
Ulrike Ottinger features large-scale photographs by the German photographer and filmmaker, which were mostly created parallel to her films. Ottinger’s body of work transcends artistic disciplines, from photography to filmmaking. “I think my work encompasses diverse interests. There are topics, which I find so interesting that I have the feeling of not being able to exhaust them in only one work, and therefore I tackle them from various angles, with a feature film and with a documentary, for example,” she shares.
Her photographs vary from surreal theatrical scenes to ethnological portrayals, from the fictional to the documentary. She takes her motifs from Europe, North America, and especially China and Mongolia in Asia. Also on view is Ottinger’s latest film “Under Snow” (2011), which is set in Echigo, Japan and portrays a snow-covered world in sharp contrast to the Philippines’ lush tropical scenery.
Ulrike Ottinger studied etching techniques and attended lectures on art history, religious studies, and ethnology in Paris. She was born in Konstanz, Germany in 1942, and lived as a painter and photographer from 1961 to 1969 in Paris, where she also developed her first script. She returned to Germany in 1969, where she founded the film club “Visuell” in cooperation with the Film Seminar at the University of Konstanz and directed the club until 1972. She has been living in Berlin since 1973.
Ottinger’s films as well as her photographs have been shown in numerous retrospectives and exhibits, including at the Venice Biennale, the Cinematheque Francaise, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Kunst-Werke Berlin.
Organized by the Goethe-Institut in cooperation with the Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum fur Film und Fernesehen (German Cinematheque – Museum for Film and Television), Ulrike Ottinger has been on tour around the world since 2012. The exhibit has been featured in Mexico, Turkey, Finland, Belgium, Spain, Israel, and Vietnam, among other countries.
Yuchengco Museum is located at RCBC Plaza, corner Ayala and Sen. Gil J. Puyat Avenues in Makati. Museum hours are from Monday to Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. For more information, call (632) 889-1234 or visit www.yuchengcomuseum.org.
