VISUAL is pleased to present Under Water Ball, an exhibition of new and existing work by Ulla von Brandenburg.

Under Water Ball takes its title from a rough translation of a new film work Un bal sous l’eau (2023), in which actors prepare for and present a depiction of a fantastical, utopian underwater society. Revealing the mechanics of the play within the film, we see both the magic and artifice inherent in the creation of such a world. The performance and performativity of the work are underscored by its presentation: projected onto a collage of former painted theatre backdrops, that form the walls of one of von Brandenburg’s signature large-scale textile installations.

A series of these textile works provide the physical structure of the exhibition, creating different ‘rooms’ within VISUAL’s Main Gallery. These large, abstracted designs, single blocks of colour, and varied shapes, contrast with and direct the viewer through the white-cube gallery. This space is transformed into a series of different perspectives and vistas, creating different routes through the exhibition. Housed within and around these ‘rooms’ are a series of sculptures, whose heaviness and all-white colour contrast with the textile work around them. The implied functionality of these sculptures; pieces of chalk; rope; a ball; sticks, hint at rituals or games that have taken or are about to take place. This latent sense of activity sets the scene for a new performance commissioned for the exhibition, A Colour Form Instead. This involves some of von Brandenburg’s regular collaborators along with Irish performers. Taking place in the opening days of the exhibition, this performance, utilising movement, song, music, costume and more, ‘activates’ the exhibition and opens a new, constructed world for the viewer.

Von Brandenburg’s practice is noted for its use of the structures and hallmarks of the theatre and performance. In Under Water Ball, the constructed, ‘fake’ nature of the exhibition is on plain view, with unusable objects, structures made of fabric, and unlikely combinations of shape, form, and colour. These tools of illusion lead to an opportunity to enter into a realm of imagination and play. In Un bal sous l’eau, the players have gone from preparing backstage with costume and makeup, to fully inhabiting a new reality; one that is shared with both the audience in the film and the exhibition. Blurring the lines between constructed world and reality, elements in Un bal sous l’eau reappear in the galleries: the film’s marionettes, themselves avatars of the actors, inhabit a theatre of their own; the spectators within the film and the viewers of the exhibition sit on the same benches. In the words of von Brandenburg:

In a space where curtains have been hung, the separation between the interior and the exterior, or between different worlds, becomes blurred. And that blur makes us wonder where we are.[1]

[1] Ulla von Brandenburg, interview with Merel van Tilburg, Dessins, Jenisch Vevey Museum, Scheidegger & Spiess, Zürich, 2018, p. 49, quoted in exhibition text for von Brandenburg’s exhibition Le Milieu est bleu, Palais de Tokyo, accessed online May 2024.