To mark her 80th birthday, the ZKM Karlsruhe is presenting a major exhibition on the work of media artist Ulrike Rosenbach. Ulrike Rosenbach was one of the first artists in Germany to use the medium of video – as early as the beginning of the 1970s. In her works, she addresses questions of female identity, gender-specific role attributions, and the holistic relationship between humans and nature.
Ulrike Rosenbach’s early performances, in which she experiments with video’s technical capabilities of direct recording, storage and playback of videos, sometimes attaching cameras to her body, received wide international acclaim. Through her participation in landmark exhibitions such as documenta 6 (1977) and documenta 8 (1987), Rosenbach became the most renowned German performance and video artist of her time.
Since 2018, Ulrike Rosenbach’s video archive, which consists of more than 600 analog tapes, is being digitized and processed at the ZKM. This retrospective exhibition, which the late Peter Weibel initiated and which is created in close collaboration with the artist, draws on the results of this work on the archive and presents over 120 works – objects, videos, media installations and video sculptures, photographs, and drawings spanning more than five decades.
Ulrike Rosenbach. today is tomorrow is part of a series of exhibitions at the ZKM that honor the important work of a pioneering generation of media artists.