Amalia Ulman | History of Photography | Conceptual | Photo Coordinates |
Amalia Ulman (born 1989 in Argentina) is an Argentine-Spanish artist who staged Excellences & Perfections on Instagram and Facebook in 2014. By posting a scripted fictional self, she made platform authenticity, self-branding, and norms of femininity into the material of the work.
Amalia Ulman was born in Argentina in 1989 and is an Argentine-Spanish artist working across performance, photography, installation, video, social media, and digital image circulation. Excellences & Perfections (2014) was presented and archived through Rhizome and the New Museum’s First Look and appeared in Tate Modern’s Performing for the Camera (2016). Her later work includes the feature film El Planeta (2021).*2
Ulman’s themes include online self-fashioning, femininity as performance, class aspiration, consumer taste, authenticity, the staging of social-media photography, and the ways platforms reinforce recognizable identities. Excellences & Perfections unfolded not as a conventional photographic series but as a sequence of social-media posts. Using selfies, hotel and restaurant settings, interiors, beauty images, captions, hashtags, timing, and audience reaction, Ulman built a believable fictional persona inside the everyday grammar of Instagram.*2 Rhizome notes that the work was scripted and that the Instagram component was preserved through a social-media archive tool, making preservation, interface, and platform context part of the work’s afterlife. Ulman’s statement that audience anger at the fiction revealed how strongly people expect truth from online self-presentation is central to the method.*4 In the 2010s, when smartphone photography and social media became everyday sites of identity management, the work made those conditions visible from inside the platform itself.*2
Rhizome and the New Museum gave the work an early institutional framework within net art and preservation discourse by archiving the Instagram performance. Its inclusion in Tate Modern’s Performing for the Camera placed Ulman’s practice within a longer history of performance for the camera. The critical core lies in making belief in social-media authenticity, audience participation, and self-branding the material of the artwork, and in treating audience reaction not merely as reception but as part of the performance’s operation.*1