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”

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.

Om liveart_dk

Liveart.dk was founded in 2004 in Copenhagen to promote the discussion, documentation and development of live art in Denmark. The organisation is equally inspired by the imaginative and entertaining English Live Art tradition as by the theoretical and political German theatre tradition. We have organised 10 large international festivals of Live Art for kids and adults since 2004, and over 40 discussion events, books, video series, symposia and more in the field of live art, performance art, art criticism and documentation. We collaborate with theatres, music venues, art museums and festivals in Denmark and internationally.