Deborah Schamoni

Sordid Scandal is a new video essay and performance by acclaimed artist Amalia Ulman. In the form of a PowerPoint presentation, the work combines personal and family confessions with colonial histories.

Expect a darkly comic exploration of identity and artistic persona. How much does fiction shape the real? How is an artist’s identity formed?

Sordid Scandal can be viewed on Amalia Ulman’s website.

Amalia Ulman’s Sordid Scandal slips between the worlds of fiction and reality. It explores the stories we tell ourselves and the stories others tell about us. The 19 minute video essay combines footage from Ulman’s forthcoming feature film, a comedy about eviction called El Planeta, with a PowerPoint presentation and voiceover commentary by the artist about the film’s creation. We move back and forth through time as the Argentinian artist discusses her childhood in Spain and a family dispute against the backdrop of national histories and colonial legacies.

There are fake identities, hoaxes and conmen. There are tales of court cases and movie sets, lawyers and landlords, ghosts and graphics. It’s a collection of stories, memories and unreliable images. As Ulman says, ‘My fictional onscreen self had devoured the living and breathing me’.

The video references Ulman’s celebrated 2014 performance Excellences & Perfections, for which she created a fictional Instagram persona – a work which featured in the exhibition Performing for the Camera at Tate Modern in 2016.

Sordid Scandal is a piece commissioned by Tate Modern. 
Text: Tate Modern, London