Einwicklung mit Julia

• Ulrike Rosenbach
• Florian Schneider-Essleben
• Julia Nolden

Inspired by the exhibition »prospect 71« at the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle in 1971, which showed body-oriented videotapes by American artists, sculptor Ulrike Rosenbach began to work with the medium of video and performance herself.

In the 4-minute video »Einwicklung mit Julia« [Wrapping with Julia], the artist is seen with head slightly cropped, wrapping gauze bandages around herself and her daughter, who is sitting on her lap, in slow ritual movements until both are tightly bound together.

Rosenbach’s earliest video performance, which marks the beginning of her artistic work with this medium, visualizes the bond between mother and daughter in intimate togetherness and at the same time represents the quest for the self as an artist and as a woman in its mise en scène.

Revolutionary is her use of the closed-circuit technique. Using black-and-white video equipment acquired shortly beforehand, the artist recorded the performance herself in her studio and thanks to near-simultaneous playback she was able to observe herself on the monitor. Ulrike Rosenbach describes this kind of self-reflection as follows: “In the video works, the partition between inside and outside is the glass of the monitor. The ‘outside’ is my movements in front of the camera, and the ‘inside’ is the image appearing on the monitor screen – as a replay of me, as psychic feedback.” [1]



[1] Ulrike Rosenbach, cited in Marlene Angermeyer-Deubner and Peter Weibel, eds., »Syntax des Sehens: Die Videosammlung des ZKM«, (Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag, 2006), 124.