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Dressage

Julika Rudelius

Galerie Reinhard Hauff, Stuttgart

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Title
Dressage
Gallery
Galerie Reinhard Hauff, Stuttgart
Duration
8 min 39 s
Format & Technical

Single channel installation, HD video, colour, audio, edition of 5 + 2 AP

Dressage features a bunch of rich girls all around 12 years old – Upper Eastside Manhattan, 21st Century society ladies of the future – dressed in designer clothes and immaculately groomed. The first half of the work shows them whispering things to each other, adjusting their clothes and doing their hair and make-up with remarkable confidence and expertise in what you think might be a backstage room before a runway show. Despite the close-up, high definition presence of the camera they seem perfectly at ease, lacking any sense of awkward self-consciousness and absolutely sure of their themselves. The second part of Dressage offers a relief and deconstructive delight as a counterpoint to the initial sense of control and containment. In an action choreographed by the artist, the girls become happy vandals. They set about demolishing the furniture and fittings in the room. As their wordless destruction continues it becomes clear that they are in a room within a room, that there is no outside, no real breaking ‘free’ and that the entire scenario is an experiment or a predetermined fiction. The video ends with them simply surveying the damage and nonchalantly flicking their hair.

  • Loop Fair Mention Honor 2010

Stills

Still
Still

Julika Rudelius

Artist
www.rudelius.org

1968, Cologne, Germany

Julika Rudelius

Julika Rudelius (*1968) lives and works in New York, USA. Her video installation “Dressage” was first presented at H Box at the New Museum, New York (travelling to Fondation Beyeler, Basel) and at Ursula Blickle Stiftung, Kraichtal (all 2010). Recent group exhibitions include And the moral of the story is…, Witte de With Center of Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2010), Actors and Extras, Argos Centre for Art and Media, Brussels, Golden Agers & Silver Surfers, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel (both 2009) and Heartland, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2008).