EXPO - Ulay: Come on

For more than four decades, the German artist Ulay has been exploring his own identity in his work. He is currently exhibiting photographs from the 1970s alongside more recent work at MOT International.

Ulay (born in 1943) may be better known as the former other half and partner in crime of the performance artist Marina Abramovic, but he has been active for more than four decades as an artist in his own right.

A quest for identity and the undermining of fossilised gender roles are the threads running through his work. In a number of photographs and films from the 1970s that are currently on show at MOT International, we see him with make-up on or posing in a tight corset in order to blur the boundaries between the sexes. He takes this further in the series Anagrammatic Bodies, for which he has made a collage with fragments of photographs of his own body and of those of women.

He gave the series a makeover in 2015: from a distance, you see almost life-size portraits of women, made up of different photographs combined to form a whole. In between some of those fragments, he has smuggled in parts of his own body, something that doesn't immediately catch the eye. One female leg, for example, turns out to be strikingly hairy, while its opposite number is smoothly shaven. Enjoyable enough, but a bit too slick in our opinion.

We were more impressed by his work from the 1970s, which shows him to be a born nomad. His photographs of Chinese people he met on his travels, of the archaeological site (now blown up by IS) of Palmyra in Syria, and of Aboriginal rituals are almost anthropological in nature. We particularly liked the seven-meter-long scroll on which the Great Wall of China is depicted. The drawing refers to the final performance in which Ulay and Abramovic said farewell to each other: she set off from the eastern end of the Great Wall of China, he from the western end, with a view to meeting up somewhere in the middle. That was an emotional milestone in performance art; here, it is accompanied by a whole range of documents. Good stuff.

Ulay: Come on; > 16/7, MOT International