Olga Ulmann

"Identification and the human body are the main focus of my oeuvre. I work as an artistic researcher using ink and textile to visually translate the reprehensible feeling of human physicality. In drawings, sculptures, and video performances I use body awareness not only as my source of understanding, but also to question human identity both from a personal and universal point of view. I do not wish to present a specific individual recognizable by anatomical characteristics and features, but rather show the human body in all its complexity. Each body carries anthropological, psychoanalytical, philosophical, historical, medical, and cultural achievements that are constantly developing and therefore changing. These elements influence each other reciprocally and exist in every single human body - this idea fascinates me. My attempt is to dissect the human body to its core and reassemble it in my alternative form to present all those remarkable elements on two dimensional surfaces using line, shape, composition and form. This process is a transcription or a paraphrasing that brings the interior of the human body to the surface, connecting it with external conditions. In some of my works the exterior may be a graphicstructure, or the inclusion of color. In other pieces it is an addition of military or political insignia, or gestures and poses that originate from the collective memory of a specific group. These pieces are often based to my own socialist childhood experience. My works fuse the elements of the inner and the outer into a complex composite image of a human being, a newly constructed form."