Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt

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

Zoo
“Zoo” is an original video created for our series of video performances,  “Now and Again”. It is a living-room performance, exhibiting the vain need to be remembered. The interest of the work is a time-based portrait. In the live moment of the performance an improvised personae is unfolded over two hours. In the repeatable video portrait cut down to twenty minutes this performed subjectivity is edited, 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. 2011-2015 she was an artistic research associate on the BA course Dance, Context and Choreography at the 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 from University of Copenhagen is here.