We are excited about the exhibition of ULAY’s work ‘Ulay Was Here’, which will kick off at the Stedelijk Museum on Saturday, 21 November. We hope that museums can safely welcome visitors by then again. The exhibition is the largest reflection on his avant-garde body of work in polaroid photography and performance art, marking the first posthumous solo exhibition of Ulay, who sadly passed away in March this year. Before his passing, Ulay was collaborating with the curators at Stedelijk on this exhibition. The exhibition will display around 200 works, including many video artworks distributed by LIMA.

Ulay (1943, Solingen, Germany–2020, Ljubljana, Slovenia) left Germany at the end of the 1960s, and came to Amsterdam where he joined a Dutch anarchist movement, the Provos and as a consultant for Polaroid International Amsterdam started to experiment with art photography. 

Ulay explored the possibilities of Polaroid since the 1970s, which resulted in radical and groundbreaking work. Through his career Ulay examined the notions of identity and the body on both the personal and communal levels, mainly through series of aphorisms, visual poetry, Polaroid photographs, and intimate performances; he introduced the term “performative photography”. 

From 1976 to 1989, Ulay collaborated with Marina Abramovic, after which he focused on photography. He remained connected to the question of the “performative,” which resulted in his constant “provocation” of audiences through the realization of numerous performances, workshops, and lecture- performances.

Check out Ulay’s works distributed by LIMA by clicking here.

Still of Ulay’s FOTOTOT (Identity Analysis), 1976