Cosmos Ottinger

As the title suggests, this exhibition will showcase everything thatmakes up the legendary Ottinger's artistic practice. This exhibition isentirely dedicated to the imagination of this extraordinary artist and ,like a dictionary that defines her languages or an alphabet that deciphers her stories, opens up her diverse and long-standing oeuvre. The exhibition rooms of the Kunsthalle become a stage, a film set, a studio, a backstage, an archive and a living museum. Photographic images map an atlas of the places in the world where she has spent her life, while installation elements and sculptural forms reflect her understanding of bodies. Cinematic spaces, which reflect her politics of storytelling and her political statements in many different forms, create interstitial spaces through their own insights and perspectives.

The work of this pioneer of avant-garde film art is captivating with its unmistakable aesthetics. Her feminist view of past and current events and the portrayal of queer personalities provide a link to current socio-political discussions.

The exhibition tour leads through the artist's extravagant film worlds using scripts, film props, object and costume installations, fabric collages and photographs.

The exhibition ends with a presentation of Ottinger's paintings, which she created as a young artist in Paris. With her paintings, she is considered one of the most important representatives of Pop Art in Europe. These works are a reminder that a critical and creative confrontation with problems that were denounced in the student protests in Paris fifty years ago must continue.

From film enthusiasts to art lovers, from strollers to travelers, from spectators to performers - visitors to Baden-Baden will take on very different positions as the exhibition reviews the most important stages of Ottinger's oeuvre. Reminiscences of her unique works such as Freak Orlando (1981) or Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse (1984) as well as examples of her subtle directorial work in other fields, from photography to painting, form a storyline to understand how Ottinger remembers and reconstructs her own way of storytelling. In the context of exhibition making, these questions are very relevant today: How do we create unique spaces of film history in a museum setting? And how can we revive these historical elements of early queer, feminist and political themes for future generations?