Amalia Ulman

Amalia Ulman (born 1989) is an Argentinian artist and film director based in New York City whose practice includes performance, installation, video and net-art works.
Life.
Amalia Ulman was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1989 and was raised in Gijón, in the Spanish province of Asturias, after emigrating with her family. In 2009, she left Spain to study at Central Saint Martins in London, where she graduated in 2011. In 2013, she was in a serious Greyhound bus accident that left her with a permanent disability.
As of 2020, Ulman lives and works in New York City.
Work.
Her work deals with issues of class, gender, and sexuality. Ulman is particularly interested in middlebrow aesthetics.
In 2012, Ulman presented "Profit | Decay," a show held with Katja Novitskova at the gallery Arcadia Missa in London.
In April 2013, she presented her first video essay "Buyer, Walker, Rover" as a Skype lecture at the Regional State Archives in Gothenburg.
In 2014, she presented two solo shows in LA, CA, "Used & New" at ltd Los Angeles and "Delicious Works" at Smart Objects, also in LA. She also presented a solo show, "Baby Footprints Crow's Feet," at Ellis King, in Dublin.
The same year Ulman started "Excellences & Perfections", a four-month performance on her Instagram account. Through her posts, Ulman fabricated a fictional character whose story unfolded in three different episodes presenting her acting as three different personas: a 'cute girl', then a 'sugar babe' and finally a 'life goddess'. "The idea was to bring fiction to a platform that has been designed for supposedly "authentic" behavior, interactions and content. The intention was to prove how easy an audience can be manipulated through the use of mainstream archetypes and characters they've seen before." Ulman's Instagram selfies were mainly taken sneaking into hotels and restaurants in Los Angeles and posted as if they documented her real life.
Ulman's exhibition "Excellences and Perfections," throughout the process was met with dissatisfied feedback. Ulman's exhibition which was meant to show the presence of gender and sex politics on social media, caused outcries with many critics saying that Ulman was throwing her career away. It was not until after the exhibition was over, signaled with an Instagram post of a black and white image of a rose captioned "the end," that Ulman began receiving positive feedback on her work in this exhibition. Excellences and Perfections was later chosen to be a part of the Electronic Superhighway Exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery in 2016.
In October 2014, during Frieze Art Fair, Ulman presented a solo show "The Destruction of Experience" at Evelyn Yard in London. For the show Ulman made "The Future Ahead", a video essay about Justin Bieber's "growth from angelic teenager to hetero-normative white male".
In January 2015, she presented "Stock Images of War," her first solo show in New York City at James Fuentes Gallery. It is an immersive installation composed of twelve simple wire-frame sculptures, each one being after a different month of the year – i.e. "War in January", "War in February", etc.
Towards the end of the same year, Ulman started "Privilege," her second Instagram performance, which would last over a year until shortly after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As opposed to "Excellences & Perfections, "where Ulman enacted an entirely fictitious character, "Privilege "saw the artist become an exaggerated version of herself and the multiplicities of her real identity, enacted mostly in the setting of a corporate office. Ulman created a diverse array of visual materials from New Yorker-style cartoons exploring class and taste to short memetic videos and images derived from office culture and the cultural climate of the time. Central to the performance were notions of ambiguity and expectations, exemplified by the build-up of Ulman's fictional pregnancy as well as the introduction of an enigmatic pigeon named "Bob", who veered between real and fake animal, hobby and obsession of the artist, and between performance companion and protagonist to sidekick.
In 2016 "Excellences and Perfections" was selected to be included in the group exhibition "Performing for the Camera" at Tate Modern, London (18 February — 12 June 2016). The exhibition, examined the relationship between photography and performance, brought together over 500 works spanning 150 years from the invention of photography to the selfie-culture of today. Through Ulman's Instagram-based project, social media was examined in the historical context of photographic performances. The installation was also part of the exhibition "Electronic Highway" at Whitechapel Gallery in London. Ulman has been described as the first social network-based artist to enter top institutional galleries.
In 2018, "Excellences & Perfections" was published as a book by Prestel. It includes the Instagram posts that she used for the project and essays by German artist Hito Steyerl, editor Rob Horning and others.
El Planeta and feature film projects.
In 2021, Ulman premiered her first feature film, El Planeta, at the Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim. Ulman wrote, produced, and directed the feature, which stars herself and her mother in the latter's debut performance on the silver screen. An absurdist comedy, the film centers on the story of a mother and daughter facing eviction in post-crisis Spain and scamming their way to a more comfortable lifestyle. The film is loosely based on the real-life Spanish mother-daughter petty-crime duo Justina and Ana Belén. The feature was shot in black and white in Gijon, the Spanish town where Ulman grew up. In March 2021, film distribution company Utopia has announced it bought the North American rights to the feature. Ulman's next film will deal with climate change and will be shot in Northern Argentina, where she was born. 