Ulrike Ottinger – Sessions

In conjunction with the “Bildarchive” exhibition at Kunst-Werke, photographs by Ulrike Ottinger were presented at the Contemporary Fine Arts gallery under the title “Sessions.” While the Kunst-Werke featured images taken before and during her feature and documentary films, the gallery focused on portraits as well as her fotonovelas—sequences condensed into a single image—conceived in the 1970s and 1980s.

“Each of the thousands upon thousands of photos (...) is a first image. It always points beyond itself: to the reality that preceded it, to countless images from the arsenals of the arts, everyday cultures, and myths, and to the visual cosmos of her own ever-denser oeuvre; the found and the invented meet in these photos. They are arenas of mutual transformation between reality and fiction, past and future, desire and fulfillment.”


Text by Katharina Sykora, “Stills and Sessions,”
Ulrike Ottinger: Sessions, ed. by Contemporary Fine Arts, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König 2001