Like few other artists, Ulrike Rosenbach (b. 1943) has shaped the development of time-based art and established it in Germany. The connection of performance and media art, of feminist reflection and technical innovation are still solidly anchored in her work today. When video cameras were just coming onto the market in Europe in 1970, Rosenbach made her first videos. Very soon thereafter the camera became an object in the performance, closed-circuit method a component of her concept, and the surroundings of the action a multimedia spatial installation.

Rosenbach was one of the first artists to declare working with traditional images of women as social gender relationships would be the point of departure for her art. While lecturing at the California Institute of the Arts in 1975–76, she had contact to American women artists on the West Coast and then founded the Schule für Kreativen Feminismus (School for Creative Feminism) in Cologne. Since the 1970s Rosenbach has been an internationally known artist with renowned exhibitions. From 1989 to 2007, she held a professorship for new artistic media at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar.