Julika Rudelius

Julika Rudelius (b. 1968) was born in Cologne, Germany. She studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam from 1994-1998.

Rudelius has had solo exhibitions at Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam; Centrum Beeldende Kunst, Maastricht, Netherlands; Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris; Reinhard Hauff Galerie, Stuttgart, Denmark; Galerie Manuela Klercks, Milan; Grazer Kunstverein, Austria; The John Institute, Zurich, Switzerland; Bard Museum at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, USA; Aeroplastics Contemporary, Bruxelles, Belgium; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands; Figge von Rosen Gallery, Cologne, Germany, and the Swiss Institute in New York City.

She is represented by Galerie Diana Stigter, Amsterdam.

While I do consider myself a feminist, I’m not sure if I would call my work feminist. I think the meaning of “feminist art” has changed a lot since the major feminist projects of the 1960s and ‘70s. For my works in film and video, I take up a range of attitudes and roles – director, interviewer, instigator, interrogator, ethnographer, etc.– that were unavailable to women artists prior to the earlier feminist movements. My work often requires me to approach strangers on the street, where I ask them to participate in interviews and staged performances that require them to reveal highly personal information. While informal bargaining and solicitation have for a long time been a part of the economic and social lives of women, I engage in these tactics openly as a basic component of my practice. In that sense, I see myself as following the feminists who first made available these powers of mobility and exchange, operating somewhere between sociological manipulation and realistic portraiture—between fiction and documentary.

In a number of projects, I’ve dealt directly with issues related to women’s lives and sexuality. For example, my video Train (2001), shot aboard a passenger train, features a group of young guys who brag and rant about their sexual exploits from a typically adolescent-male point of view. I purposely filmed their conversation from the perspective of a voyeuristic fellow rider so that viewers have to sort out whether they believe the video is a documentary or a staged performance. In fact, while the dialogue was improvised, the scene was carefully staged. Prior to the shoot, I had instructed the four teenagers, whom I’d recently met on the street, to participate in an interview with me about girls and sex, but to exaggerate their opinions. My questions to them were edited out of the final cut.

The work I showed in the Global Feminisms exhibition, Tagged (2003), focuses on a group of Turkish and Moroccan immigrants, all young men, and their obsession with name-brand clothing. Dressing and preening for the camera, they talk about the extravagant cost of their garments and the social capital they hope to accrue by flaunting their wealth. While espousing typically macho ambitions, the boys appear to outsiders as dandyish, even effeminate, enmeshed in the drama of assimilation. Tagged suspends judgment on the boys’ obsessive macho-dandyism, putting the burden of commentary on viewers, and along with it, self-awareness.