In the performances that have established her international reputation, Vanessa BEECROFT sets a group of characters, usually a homogenous selection of nude or undressed young women, in a tableau vivant. All the components are meticulously chosen according to autobiographical concerns and sometimes contextual considerations. For the artist, 'the girls' are at the same time the basic material of her work as well as projections of herself. During the performance, lasting for several hours, they stay silent, immobile and impassive to the audience, occasionally breaking their initial order to sit or stretch. In this way the painting develops a life of its own. The piece is documented by photographs and sometimes by video.

VB51 marks a milestone in the work of Vanessa BEECROFT who planned the film that was drawn from the performance as an autonomous piece. The artists was inspired by the setting - not an art space but a private home (the summer residence of a family which is part of the German high aristocracy) - and the movie Last Year in Marienbad by Alain RESNAIS, whose suspended and refined atmosphere she tries to evoke. The protagonists are twenty five women of various ages and with diverse features: members of the artist's family (mother, sister and mother-in-law), representatives of the local aristocracy and two aristocrats ad honorem, the German actresses Irm HERMANN and Hanna SCHYGULLA. It is Hanna SCHYGULLA, among others one of the muses of director Rainer Werner FASSBINDER, who breaks for the first time the silence in a performance as she intones extracts from Franz SCHUBERT's Winterreise. The audience, that the artist wanted formally dressed appears in this way in the film and contributes equally to its overall vision.

Through these multiple aspects of one woman, Vanessa BEECROFT places herself both outside the action, being its invisible organizer, and at the centre of it, identifying herself, at this particular moment of her life, with all these women in general but no one in particular.