Sophie Thun, Ulay Event

SOPHIE TAPPEINER is pleased to present

Sophie Thun, Ulay
the uncontrolled aspect of rushing into position

Opening: Tuesday, 07 May 2024, 6-9 pm

the uncontrolled aspect of rushing into position brings together resonating works by Sophie Thun (1985) and Ulay (1943–2020). Both their performative-photographic practices revolve relentlessly around the (re)construction of the self and their relation to the photographic medium; they perform for the camera while chronicling their working processes and probing the conditions and limitations of analogue image production. For Thun and Ulay, their bodies are vital tools and extensions of their photographic apparatus.

The life and work of Ulay (born Frank-Uwe Laysiepen) has been marked by a certain fleeing – running away from his origins (only to return to himself again and again) and, at a certain point, withdrawing from the art world. Iconicised by the relationship and collaboration with Marina Abramović, his solo work remains largely unknown and somewhat untheorised; the most-known unknown artist, as some have said of him. “I’m a hideaway artist. I have done so many things that people don’t know about – they can’t know because they don’t have access to my archive,” he stated in his last printed interview in 2019.

Recently, Sophie Thun established an intimate dialogue with two archives: that of Irène Codréano (1896–1985), a lesser-known Romanian sculptor, and that of Zenta Dzividzinska (1944–2011), a marginalised Latvian photographer. For this exhibition, she has worked closely with the Ulay Foundation, based between Ljubljana and Amsterdam, spending time in Ulay’s storage and archive rooms, actively engaging with his renowned gestures of the 1970s self-stagings as well as with all that is fragile, silenced or hidden.

The exhibition is curated by Hana Ostan Ožbolt and runs parallel to the exhibition at Charim Gallery, which also showcases Ulay’s works. Both exhibitions are the first solo presentations of Ulay’s work in Vienna.