BRUSSELS.- Celebrated as one of the most influential performance artists of his generation, MOT International presents Ulay's first solo exhibition in Brussels. Referencing his 1970s series Anagramatic Bodies, new photo collages feature German actresses Nina Hoss and Iris Berben, together with models Lily McMenamy and Stella Lucia, while works from the artist’s photographic archive cumulatively recount his nomadic, itinerant life over the past forty years. The exhibition includes rarely-presented projects produced during his career defining collaboration with Marina Abramović, such as the artist's extensive personal documentation of 1988's The Great Wall Walk in diaries, drawings and a pair of seven metre scrolls, in addition to photographs recording the artist's time in the Central Australian Desert (1979) with members of the aboriginal Pintubi community.

Addressing the artist's continued interest in dismanteling constructs of self-identification and gender, early Polaroid self-portraits, performances and collaborations with Jürgen Klauke offer an extraordinary opportunity to survey the Ulay's radical contributions to photography and performance history.

Ulay was born in Solingen, Germany in 1943 and lives and works in Amsterdam and Ljubliana. Upcoming and recent exhibitions include ULAY, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Invisible Opponent, Musées d’art et d’histoire, Geneva; Ulay: Polaroids, Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam; The Touch of Art, Museum Tinguely, Basel (2016) and In Vivo: Ulay, Musée d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2015).

Frank Uwe Laysiepen was born in a bomb-shelter during the Second World War in the steel manufacturing city of Solingen, Germany. His earliest photographic work documented the machinery and factories of post-war industrial Neuwied where assembly lines built commodities branded MADE IN GERMANY. Yet Uwe Laysiepen has spent his adult life seeking to, if not escape, then 'unlearn' how identity is described and defined.

Following the early death of his father and his mother’s complete withdrawal from family-life, Uwe Laysiepen first attempted to break with 'German-ness' in 1968. In an act repeated in later years, he left for Amsterdam in a borrowed car with only a camera and a typewriter, discarding all other personal belongings. In the wake of the Provo movement and within a climate of intellectual and political curiosity, Uwe Laysiepen began to explore delimitations of 'self', in particular coded expressions of gender identity. Introduced to the city's drag and transvestite subcultures by the artist Jürgen Klauke, Uwe Laysiepen adopted the modes of gender performance he observed in this community to directly confront dichotomies of 'male' and 'female'.

While these early, antagonistic experiments highlighted the performative nature of femininity— Polaroid sequences illustrate the artist applying make-up and posing provocatively in suspenders and corsets—with Klauke he equally explored representations of machismo: modelling lounge suits and posturing as gunslingers in a game of 'fast-draw'. Crucially, it was during this period of experimentation that Laysiepen assumed the eponym 'Ulay', a portmanteau of his second and last names, marking the beginning of his journey towards a ‘second-self’. As Ulay, he tested the physical limits of his body and ideas surrounding dual identity in works that would directly anticipate his extraordinary partnership with Marina Abramović.

The Ulay and Abramović collaboration was influenced by extensive travel. Describing the terms of their 'Relation Works', the first two lines of their 'Art Vital' credo read: 'no fixed living-place, permanent movement'. With Abramović, Ulay decamped again, leaving Amsterdam in the black Citroën van that would become their home for the next four years. Following their participation in the 1979 Sydney Biennial, Abramović and Ulay spent an extended period of time in the Central Australian Desert, predominately with aboriginal members of the Pintubi village. The challenges and extremities of the environment, forms of ascesis central to the tribe's rituals and their nomadic existence resonated with the artists' own interests. During this time, Ulay documented in detail his relationship with Watuma Tarruru Tjungarray, who would travel to Amsterdam in 1984 to participate in a performance of Nightsea Crossing. Though the artist shared an enduring intimacy with Watuma, who gifted Ulay his own name, Tjungarray, Ulay’s photographs of the Pintubi also acknowledge an essential distance between the two men, in which the artist is present as a privileged spectator.

Marking the end of their collaboration, Abramović and Ulay's final work The Great Wall Walk took place in 1988 (it was conceived in 1981 and took six years to bring to fruition), by which point the artists were no longer on speaking terms. In a journey taking ninety days, Abramović began walking from the eastern end of the Great Wall of China, at Shan Hai Guan on the shores of the Yellow Sea and Ulay started at the western end of the Wall, at Jai Yu Guan, the south-western periphery of the Gobi Desert, with the two meeting in the middle. Throughout the trip Ulay photographed, drew and wrote poetry about his surroundings in prodigious detail; the activity of documentation becoming a mindful act of ‘being present’ within the landscape. Each image highlights the thousands of steps taken, witnessing the intense dialectic of the Abramović / Ulay partnership, but also its passing.

The artist describes the Polaroids taken during his time in both China and Australia as travel photography, clearly distinct from his self-imaging Polaroid works, or the performances he produced with Abramović explicitly for an audience. Travel photography was a tradition he first engaged with as Uwe Laysiepen in the late 1960s - working as a consultant photographer for the Polaroid Corporation he was commissioned to document Amsterdam, London, Rome and Paris for the book ‘5 Cities’, during which he visited New York for the first time. As Uwe, arriving in New York in 1970, his encounter with a bare-foot Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias (later Jagger) earned him yet another name – to Bianca he was ‘July’. As Ulay, he later returned to America with Abramović to drive across the country in a Cadillac, sleeping in the open trunk of the car with an Illyrian Sheepdog for company.

Coming full circle, Ulay returned to Berlin in late 2015 to revisit the early series Anagramatic Bodies, some forty years after he first pieced together Polaroids of himself and his first female collaborator, Paula Francois-Piso, under the joint-name PA-ULAY. In reference to his earlier strategies of cross-gendered performance, Ulay photographed both himself and a series of women in a shoot redolent of fashion magazine spreads. Combining the models’ bodies with his own through fragmented, close, cropped images that isolate legs, hands and torsos, he exposes the camera’s potential to fetishize and positions his own aging flesh in stark contrast to the supple forms of his models.

The extensive photographic archive presented within this exhibition traces the artist's early negotiation of prescribed national identity in post-war Germany and his interest in dismantling social constructs of self-identification, while later works recount the itinerant, nomadic existence and encounters which so richly influenced his works. These encounters, most potently with Abramović, underscore how throughout Ulay's practice the positioning of 'the other' has served as an axis to his own complex, evolving understanding of identity.