In Ulu Braun’s versatile oeuvre, collages are a recurring element, not just in objects and paintings, but also in installations, films, and video art. In fact, his video collages have given rise to a new genre. In conjunction with painting, Ulu Braun creates constructed realities through layered and overlapping designs, which also make room for the absurd and the impossible besides accommodating real props and symbols. As in fantasy worlds, the concepts of time and space seem to have been abolished through the close juxtaposition of a wide range of motifs, allowing for the coexistence of idyllic scenes and disturbing details.

— Magdalena Koschat

Ulu Braun, a “critical new romantic” (Hajo Schiff, taz, 2010), creates new worlds in his collages. His main medium is film/video. In his wall-sized projections, imaginary cameras fly through bizarre virtual worlds reminiscent of video games, within which numerous little minidramas take place. Yet what initially seems like an artificial paradise is consistently disturbed by various distressing details, so that anything idyllic is always offset by something disastrous.
Braun’s specific objects appear to have their origins in these virtual worlds. His Plankton shows a chimera of chicks and an oily prawn tail on some blood-soaked pumice stones: innocent cuteness vs. brutal reality – an image which clearly creates associations with environmental pollution and genetic engineering.

— Felix Kucher

Working with Roland Rauschmeier (‘BitteBitteJaJa’ together), in the series Cadavres Exquis Vivants Ulu Braun transfers the term ‘Cadavre Exquis’ to his video art, a method of surrealism in which several people create a text or drawing at random without knowing what the other person has created beforehand. The video collages based on them feature brief, repetitive, animated portraits of famous people constructed from various picture fragments. They appear in an absurdly composed, lively physical image placed within a surreal context in which they are deprived of their celebrity symbolism and yet at the same time are reduced to this.

— Magdalena Koschat

In collaboration with Roland Rauschmeier (with whom he created BitteBitteJaJa), in theCadavres Exquis Vivants(living, exquisite corpses) series Ulu Braun transfers the “Cadavre Exquis” concept into his video art, a method developed in surrealism whereby several persons allow a text or a drawing to be created by chance without having any knowledge of the part previously created by the other person. The video collages based on this concept show brief, repeated, animated portraits of significant figures, constructed from a wide variety of pictorial fragments. These are part of a bizarre setting that is reminiscent of fairy tales, science fiction and dream worlds, and can be read as socio-critical “poetic dramas of everyday life”.

Collage techniques are a significant component in the artistic works of Ulu Braun, both in his video art and his objects. Here he combines unrelated everyday objects such as foods, sports equipment, dolls, animals’ heads and other objects made from a range of materials to form wonderful arrangements with surrealist tones. His ‘objets trouvés’ are sourced from the themes of nature/anti-nature, colonialism, primal sculpture and archaic gestures.

— Magdalena Koschat