Ulrike Ottinger

The internationally renowned film director, artist, and author Ulrike Ottinger (*1942, Konstanz, GER, lives and works in Berlin) presented COSMOS OTTINGER, a major exhibition at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. From Ottinger's archive, the photoprint of the duo Leni-Lena participates in the exhibition together with other selected images from Freak Orlando (1981) in the room "Doppelfiguren." Doubling images is a well-known artistic technique, and in Ottinger's films, we see many examples of twins, couples, or duplicated forms. This is also the central image chosen to promote the exhibition, and it works well with other dualities, doublings, and duos in the Kunsthalle.

The Siamese twins Lena-Leni, played by Delphine Seyrig and Jackie Raynal, represent a marvelous apparition with whom the film’s main character, Orlanda Zyklopa, played by actress Magdalena Montezuma, falls in love. The character of Orlanda Zyklopa, who lives through several eras with different genders, is an allusion to the character Orlando in Virginia Woolf’s novel. The names, which change from episode to episode, express the motif of fluid gender that continually runs through Ottinger’s oeuvre.