Amalia Ulman was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1989 and was raised in Gijón, in the Spanish province of Asturias, after emigrating with her family. In 2009, she left Spain to study at Central Saint Martins in London, where she graduated in 2011. In 2013, she was in a serious Greyhound bus accident that left her with a permanent disability. Ulman lives and works in New York City, since moving there in 2020.
Work
Her work deals with issues of class, gender, and sexuality. Ulman is particularly interested in middlebrow aesthetics. In 2012, Ulman presented Profit | Decay,a show held with Katja Novitskova at the gallery Arcadia Missa in London. In April 2013, she presented her first video essayBuyer, Walker, Rover as a Skype lecture at the Regional State Archives in Gothenburg. In 2014, she presented two solo shows in LA, CA, Used & New at ltd Los Angeles and Delicious Works at Smart Objects, also in LA. She also presented a solo show, Baby Footprints Crow’s Feet, at Ellis King, in Dublin. The same year Ulman started "Excellences & Perfections", a four-month performance on her Instagram account. Through her posts, Ulman fabricated a fictional character whose story unfolded in three different episodes presenting her acting as three different personas: a 'cute girl', then a 'sugar babe' and finally a 'life goddess'. "The idea was to bring fiction to a platform that has been designed for supposedly "authentic" behavior, interactions and content. The intention was to prove how easy an audience can be manipulated through the use of mainstream archetypes and characters they've seen before." Ulman's Instagram selfies were mainly taken sneaking into hotels and restaurants in Los Angeles and posted as if they documented her real life. Ulman’s exhibition "Excellences and Perfections," throughout the process was met with dissatisfied feedback. Ulman's exhibition which was meant to show the presence of gender and sex politics on social media, caused outcries with many critics saying that Ulman was throwing her career away. It was not until after the exhibition was over, signaled with an Instagram post of a black and whiteimage of a rose captioned "the end," that Ulman began receiving positive feedback on her work in this exhibition. Excellences and Perfections was later chosen to be a part of the Electronic Superhighway Exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery in 2016. In October 2014, during Frieze Art Fair, Ulman presented a solo show The Destruction of Experience at Evelyn Yard in London. For the show Ulman made "The Future Ahead", a video essay about Justin Bieber's "growth from angelic teenager to hetero-normative white male". In January 2015, she presented Stock Images of War, her first solo show in New York City at James Fuentes Gallery. It consisted of an immersive installation composed of twelve simple wire-frame sculptures, each one being after a different month of the year – i.e. "War in January", "War in February", etc. Towards the end of the same year, Ulman started Privilege, her second Instagram performance, which would last until over a year until shortly after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As opposed to Excellences & Perfections, where Ulman enacted an entirely fictitious character, Privilege saw the artist become an exaggerated version of herself and the multiplicities of her real identity, enacted mostly in the setting of a corporate office. Throughout the performance, Ulman created a diverse array of visual materials from New Yorker-style cartoons exploring ideas of class and taste to short memetic videos and images derived from office culture and the cultural climate of the time. Central to the performance were notions of ambiguity and expectations, primarily exemplified by the build-up of Ulman's fictional pregnancy as well as the introduction of an enigmatic pigeon named "Bob", who veered between real and fake animal, hobby and obsession of the artist, and between performance companion and protagonist to sidekick. In 2016 "Excellences and Perfections" was selected to be included in the group exhibition Performing for the Camera at Tate Modern, London. The exhibition, which examined the relationship between photography and performance, brought together over 500 works spanning 150 years from the invention of photography in the 19th century to the selfie-culture of today. Through Ulman's Instagram-based project, social media was examined in the historical context of photographic performances. The installation was also part of the exhibition Electronic Highway at Whitechapel Gallery in London. Ulman has thus been described as the first social network-based artist to enter top institutional galleries. In 2018, Excellences & Perfections was published as a book by Prestel. It includes the Instagram posts that she used for the project and essays by German artistHito Steyerl, editor Rob Horning and others.
