Ulrike Rosenbach

Ulrike Rosenbach’s expansive oeuvre is synonymous with the history of performance and video art. From the 1970s onwards, she focused on the female body as an interface between nature, culture, and technology, pioneering (eco)feminist performance practice and applying newly available recording and playback technologies in her work. Within and between different works, she created a continuous feedback loop between performance as a live event and liveness as a recorded event, from which new installations and video works would often emerge. 

The history of performance has often been narrated as the immediate and temporal experience of an event with the spectator as a witness. Rosenbach, and by extension this monograph, departs from the notion of the “witness” as a documentarian of the live performance to include research on how the various media the artist works in—performance, video, sculpture, installation, photography, drawing—relate to, channel, and act as material witnesses to her performance practice.

An intergenerational and international group of scholars, writers, artists, curators. and critics scrutinize this question of being a witness, while highlighting the throughlines in Rosenbach’s five-decades-long practice.