Ulla Hvejsel

Works for Live Art Denmark
2011 “A Speech to the Silent Majority” at Samtalekøkken
2014 “Talking Out of My Ass” at Live Art for Børn 1
2016 “Talking Out of My Ass” at Live Art for Børn 3
2022 “Trickle Down Economy” at Friisland Live #5

A Speech to the Silent Majority
Ulla presented her performance lecture “A Speech to the Silent Majority” at Samtalekøkken. Following the example of a mythological Danish queen named Kraka, she attempted to “speak without actually saying anything at all”. She then speaks quite a lot as she launches into a smart and humorous tour of examples for silences in art and history, including a full length participative rendition of 4’33, the famous piano piece by John Cage, in which no piano is played.

Talking Out of My Ass
“The ass is a complicated body part, and for that reason it may be able to give new complicated answers to the old complicated questions.”
Ulla has been addressing art audiences old and young out of her ass continuously since 2014 with a series of performances, talks, interviews and quizzes. At our first Live Art for Børn festival in 2014, we were lucky enough to book one of Ulla’s ass’ first appearances. For this performance, the naked ass was inserted in a background projection of al fresco paintings from the 14th cenntury found in Danish churches. The children in the audience were allowed to ask it all the questions they could come up with. We invited her back again for the third edition Live Art for Børn in Ålborg. This time, children competed in a quiz against the ass.

Trickle Down Economy
Ulla joined the fifth event of live performance art at our project space Friisland, returning to her favorite subject of human waste. Throughout her entertaining performance lecture, Ulla invited us in the audience to change our perspective on shit, and learn to consider it as a valuable resource, among many other aspects.

Workshop in Nordhavn 2022

About the Artist
Ulla was  born in 1975, at the birthclinic “Fødselsanstalten” in Aarhus. That is now closed. She graduated with an MFA in art and arttheory from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 2006. That is still there. Since then she has worked extensively and experimentally with theatre, television, parenting, nursing, videoediting, comedy, performance, selfdeceit, curating, naked truths and more. At the moment she is mostly talking out of her ass.

Ulla often works with longterm projects where she works and researches her way through different aspects of a topic or a concept in a variety of different media and contexts. Her work has been shown locally, internationally, in art-centres as well as in perfectly inconspicuous locations.

Ulla’s famous ass has its own website. Documentation of activities involving Ulla’s other body parts can be found here.