Image archive

Ulrike Ottinger's films and photographs investigate remote corners of the world, such as Mongolia and Ukraine, using both fictional and documentary means. Her associatively connected voyages meander through the peripheries of cities, countries and societies, and against that backdrop capture human splendor and misery, reality and illusion, surface and depth. Her aesthetic tends to the theatrical--literary and historical figures including Dorian Gray and Joan of Arc have been known to make appearances--and to the elaborately decorated, thanks in part to her travels and her passion for collecting. She has archives full of objects and images of all kinds, accumulated on her globetrotting jaunts, and often draws from this stock to mediate issues of gender and character, power and sexuality from many different angles.