An afternoon in New York City with Amalia Ulman

Amalia Ulman is one of the most important artists of the last decade. So when we heard she was about to release her second feature film, Magic Farm, we requested an interview and ended up on a journey via New York public transport with the artist and her one-year-old dog, Variety Magazine. Amalia was born in Buenos Aires and raised in Spain. She studied fine art at Central Saint Martins in London before moving to the US – first to LA, and now New York. Her performance work, Excellences and Perfections had her dubbed the first “Instagram artist” and saw her posting a ‘fake’ persona to Instagram over the course of four months and resulted in 90k followers. That was back in 2014, and ten years on, it definitely seems like Amalia predicted the future of social media. Magic Farm, released by Mubi, is different. Vibrant, camp, experimental and high-energy, it stars Chloë Sevigny and Alex Wolff (as well as Amalia and her grandmother) and tells the story of a group of wannabe Vice-style documentarians so wrapped up in their own interests that they accidentally visit the wrong country and completely miss a much more important story unfolding in the rural Argentine village they’re staying in. Interview: Dora DB Videography: Noah Gravs Editing: David Spence Featured artwork courtesy of Amalia Ulman Music: Piensa En Mi by Chicken, Amalia Ulman