Ulrike Rosenbach, allied since the early 1970s with the feminist movement, takes her own person as a point of departure for her video works, including elements of her biography to broaden her field of action, a language at once poetical and critical, a hybrid image that integrates the female figure into artistic creation from the inside. Das Feenband is the complex experience of this hybridity, this double refraction of reality. Inside the sphere, a visual and sonic gong, there are intertwined forms, luminescences, pure symbols. The spherical shape is an unmediated mirror of the artist, sending her to other levels of representation, archaic territories. For, although this image is at first a biographical reflection, it extends towards symbolic concepts and mythological figures by means of images connected by association of ideas in a series of linkages. An imaginary link between the photographs of her daughter, of herself, and that statue version of the artist as Diana the Huntress. Venus or Artemis, Ulrike Rosenbach invokes classical mythology throughout her work, the better to make her way among modern myths. An untamed, wild, androgynous, protective figure, she creates her own lunar envelope, a figure containing in herself all figures. She is the equidistant centre of all superficial points; that is to say, of all figures the most perfect and the most completely like itself. Das Feenband poses the issue of the dilemma, the tension, the necessary choice for a woman to redefine her own space between her transcendence and her alienation in the object-image, to shatter established formal contours, to overflow the image and fill space differently, to represent the female whole.

Stéphanie Moisdon
(Extrait du catalogue Vidéo et après. La collection vidéo du Musée national d'art moderne. Editions Carré et Editions du Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. 1992.)