Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt

Work for Live Art Danmark
2014 “Zoo” for Now and Again

Zoo
“Zoo” is an original video which Cecilie created for our series of video performances Now and Again. On screen, we witness Cecilie performing in a living-room, exhibiting the vain need to be remembered. Over two hours in front of the video camera, a time-based portrait unfolds, and an improvised personae emerges from the live situation. With the material edited down to twenty minutes, the performed subjectivity is shaped and consolidated into a contradictory and tamed portrait of the artist as a young woman. Editing and sound are explicitly commenting the act of auto-portraiture as the performance is remediated into video. In this way, Zoo becomes a conversation between several agents in the act of portraiture: the talking subject, the observing audience, the video edit, the sound, the location of the set and the institutional context framing the work.

Still from the video “Zoo”

About the Artist
The performance artist Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt studied Comparative Literature in Copenhagen and Applied Theatre Studies in Gießen. From 2011 to 2015 she was an artistic research associate on the BA course Dance, Context and Choreography at HZT Berlin. She works in collaboration with colleagues such as Monster Truck, Boris Nikitin, Matthias Meppelink and deufert+plischke. Together with the Swiss performance artist Lucie Tuma she founded the artistic duo Chuck Morris, and with souvereines (presented among others, at our Samtalekøkken), made state visits to Switzerland, Austria, Germany and Denmark as the coming Queen.

Cecilie’s page on the University of Copenhagen’s website is here.