Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation

Curated by Erin Christovale and Meg Onli

The Julia Stoschek Foundation presents the European premiere of Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation, the first major retrospective of the work of groundbreaking video and performance artist Ulysses Jenkins (b. 1946 in Los Angeles). A pivotal influence on contemporary art for over fifty years, Jenkins has produced video and media work that conjures vital expressions of how image, sound, and cultural iconography inform representation.

Using archival footage, photographs, image processing, and soundtracks, Jenkins interrogates questions of race and gender as they relate to ritual, history, and the power of the state. Organized closely with the artist—including the digitization of a sprawling archive and conversations with Ulysses Jenkins and his collaborators—the exhibition encompasses a broad range of works that showcase his collaborations, mural paintings, photography, and performances, revealing the scope of Jenkins’s practice.

Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation was co-organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and curated by Erin Christovale, Curator, Hammer Museum, and Meg Onli, Independent Curator. The Julia Stoschek Foundation presentation was organized by curator Lisa Long with curatorial assistance by Savannah Jade Thümler.

Original support for Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, with additional support from Pamela J. Joyner and Alfred J. Giuffrida, and Lyndon J. Barrois and Janine Sherman Barrois. Support for curatorial research has been provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. The republication of Ulysses Jenkins’s Doggerel Life: Stories of a Los Angeles Griot is made possible with support from the Getty.

The opening event will culminate in a responsive concert by Matana Roberts. Limited capacity.

About
Established in 2017, the Julia Stoschek Foundation is a non-profit arts and culture organization dedicated to the public presentation, advancement, conservation, and scholarship of time-based art. Across two publicly accessible exhibition spaces in Berlin and Düsseldorf, the Julia Stoschek Foundation presents pioneering media and performance art in large-scale exhibitions and discursive events. The foundation also manages the Julia Stoschek Collection (est. 2002), one of the world’s most comprehensive private collections of time-based art.