Amalia Ulman

Ulman was born in Argentina in 1989, grew up in Gijón, Spain, and studied at Central Saint Martins in London. Her official website presents net art, photography, performance, video, and film as a continuous body of work, tracing concerns that run from Excellences & Perfections and Privilege to Sordid Scandal and El Planeta^*1. At its center is the way class, appearance, consumption, work, and the body are used to assign value to people. Speaking about Los Angeles, she has described her interest in how people edit their lives for others and how class differences become visually apparent while moving through the city^*19.

When Excellences & Perfections began in 2014, Instagram was shifting from a service for sharing everyday photographs into a platform for continuously promoting one’s life, body, tastes, and profession. A photograph’s credibility no longer depended on the depicted event alone. Earlier posts, follower counts, geolocation, captions, hashtags, and the spacing of posts combined to produce the sense of a coherent life^*4. Instead of describing this system from outside, Ulman fed scripted posts into the account she already used^*7. The work had to occupy the same space as ordinary posts in order to test which photographs viewers accepted as records of real life^*14.

This decision also addressed a situation in which the work and appearance of young women artists are evaluated together. In a public discussion organized by Rhizome, Ulman asked how women artists are expected to look and behave, how we consume images, and how images consume us. To examine how displaying her own body could become publicity, sexual evaluation, and career management at once, she needed a platform where appearance and popularity were quantified, not simply a gallery wall^*20.

Why Did the Work Have to Be Performed on Instagram?

Ulman was not testing whether viewers could detect retouching in a selfie. On social media, a person’s identity takes shape as the same figure repeatedly displays similar places, language, and habits. A staged photograph shown in an exhibition would announce itself as fiction from the outset^*6. Excellences & Perfections withheld its status as an artwork and unfolded at the pace of ordinary Instagram use^*10. Months of mirrors in hotels, meals, flowers, lingerie, tears, treatment, and exercise allowed followers to fill the gaps between photographs and assemble a life story themselves^*12.

Why Use Familiar Female Archetypes?

Ulman has explained that she chose types viewers already recognized so that the structure of the experiment would remain legible. The narrative moved through three stages: the innocent young woman arriving in the city, the woman pursuing advancement through consumption and sexual appeal, and the woman returning to a healthy life after a breakdown. These were less private confessions than plots already circulating through Tumblr, fashion advertising, gossip media, and wellness culture^*6. Because the photographs were familiar, followers could infer romance, income, occupation, and mental state from limited information^*8. The work exposed how those inferences relied on shared models of femininity and class^*13.

Los Angeles supplied practical conditions for the performance. Ulman has described it as a city shaped by the fashion industry where she could inhabit another persona without repeatedly running into acquaintances. Hotels, cosmetic surgery, beauty culture, fitness, and luxury retail also provided settings in which the body and consumption signify social mobility^*5. She chose the city for more than its visual style: it allowed her to sustain an invented life in real locations over time^*19.

What the Comments Revealed About Judgment

Followers’ responses were not reactions added after the work; they helped form the persona as the performance unfolded. The innocent young woman, the sexually self-styled woman, and the woman restored to health drew different forms of praise, concern, and condemnation. Ulman later said that audience response also influenced the development of Privilege^*5. Comments and unfollows recorded more than the fact that viewers had accepted a fiction. They preserved, in concrete language, judgments about which forms of behavior were acceptable for a young woman in relation to her body, pregnancy, success, spending, and recovery^*14.

From Feminist Performance to Social Media

Performing images of femininity has a history in staged photography and feminist performance, including the work of Cindy Sherman. Ulman moved this method from the completed single image to a public account updated as part of daily life. In Sherman’s film-still photographs, costume, makeup, and composition compress a feminine type into one frame^*2. In Ulman’s work, continued posting, text, geolocation, and viewer response build the persona^*3. Tate’s inclusion of the project in Performing for the Camera helped situate it within the history of performance for the camera, beyond the novelty of the internet platform^*17.

Excellences & Perfections, 2014

The work unfolded on Ulman’s own Instagram account from April through September 2014. Selfies, photographs of restaurants and hotels, flowers, clothing, food, pole dancing, images staged to suggest breast surgery, apologies, and posts signaling recovery appeared in the sequence of the three personas^*4. Because actual experiences were mixed with staged events, deciding whether each photograph was true or false does not explain the work as a whole^*6. Credibility arose from the familiar sequence of the posts and the apparent development of the person over time^*10.

Posts, Captions, Time, and Interface

In this work, photographs cannot be separated from captions and hashtags. Short texts suggested romance or states of health; geolocation supplemented signs of lifestyle; gaps between posts encouraged viewers to imagine breakdown and recovery^*4. The medium therefore included Instagram’s chronological feed and profile page, not simply a collection of selfies^*7. Rhizome’s Webrecorder preserved the structure of the interface, demonstrating what disappears when later exhibitions extract the photographs from the platform^*11.

Privilege, 2015–16

In Privilege, Ulman used a corporate office setting, an exaggerated version of herself, pregnancy, a pigeon named Bob, and inexpensive decorations to address work, the female body, class, and political language. Pregnancy supplied a nine-month temporal structure, while another character signaled the presence of a script. By offering clearer signs of fiction than the earlier work, Privilege shifted the question from making viewers believe to examining how they participate in a performance they already recognize^*5. The choice of cheap, easily reproduced props reflected both economic necessity and the standardized commodities that construct corporate environments^*9.

Archives and Exhibition

Social-media works change as services alter their features, redesign interfaces, or remove accounts. In Excellences & Perfections, photographs, captions, comments, profile information, and posting order formed a single structure; saving the images alone could not preserve the work’s progression. Rhizome’s Webrecorder captured Instagram’s screen and interactions, including display formats later lost through redesign^*4. At the same time, archiving raised questions about the privacy of commenters and about who owns memory produced on social media^*11. Preservation became a new editorial act: a decision about which screens and responses should remain in the public record^*21.

In the later video work Sordid Scandal, Ulman examined how family history, rumor, archival footage, and the authority of a narrator shape fact, extending the question beyond online personas. Her feature film El Planeta follows an impoverished mother and daughter who use clothing and behavior to present a different life, tracing the gap between economic circumstances and the self shown to others^*15. Although the medium shifted from Instagram to moving images, the question remained: who speaks, and which fragments are accepted as evidence of a life?^*22.

Beyond the “Hoax” Reading

Excellences & Perfections was often described as an Instagram deception or prank. Yet the conclusion that photographs can lie was already familiar from the histories of staged photography and digital manipulation. Ulman relied less on sophisticated compositing than on ordinary hotels, meals, lingerie, self-help language, and regular posting to make fiction feel routine^*7. Followers did not accept a single photograph unconditionally^*14. They followed familiar conventions for reading other people’s daily lives on Instagram and built a consistent persona from repeated images and texts^*18.

Class, Consumption, and the Body of the Young Woman Artist

The three personas in Excellences & Perfections convey narratives of upward mobility as well as differences in taste. Hotels, cosmetic surgery, brands, and healthy food appear as means of managing the body and converting attractiveness into capital. Ulman has discussed her interest in the pleasures of consumption, its physical and emotional costs, and the class differences made visible in Los Angeles^*19. To address how young women artists are judged through appearance and behavior alongside their work, she staged that system of evaluation on a platform where her own appearance could be appraised as a commodity^*20.

How Social-Media Photographs Acquire Credibility

Ulman’s place in photographic history cannot be explained simply by her early use of Instagram. She made the credibility of a photograph depend on posting order, text, profile information, and exchanges with followers in addition to optical recording^*3. Where staged photography completes a role within a single image, Ulman sustained an account long enough for a persona to emerge and recorded viewers’ judgments in the comments^*16. As Rhizome’s preservation project demonstrates, conserving the work for the future requires preserving posting order, the former interface, captions, and responses along with the photographs^*21.