Boudry & Lorenz
June 04 — June 11
Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz have been working together in Berlin since 2007. They produce installations that choreograph the tension between visibility and opacity. Their films capture performances in front of the camera, often starting with a song, a picture, a film or a score from the near past. They upset normative historical narratives and conventions of spectatorship, as figures and actions across time are staged, layered and re-imagined. Their performers are choreographers, artists and musicians, with whom they are having a long-term conversation about the conditions of performance, the violent history of visibility, the pathologization of bodies, but also about companionship, glamour and resistance.
Project Description
With the support of Goethe-Institut New York Pauline and Renate were awarded their BOFFO Residency Fire Island as a way to process and decompress after the premiere of their first US solo exhibition.
Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz presented their first US solo exhibition “Everybody talks about the weather… We don’t” at Participant Inc. in New York City. It opened to the public on June 2 and concluded on July 16, 2017. It included a major new moving image work — Telepathic Improvisation — and two new sculptures.
Artistic-political methods such as opacity — opposing the principles of rendering the Other transparent — determine the duo’s way of creating installations. With their films and sculptures, and the placement of screens and objects in space, they create a dense net of references to the history of art and the often cruel and excluding history of visualization and the gaze. They play with dis/connections between objects and meaning, and with the conventional gendering of material. Does the hair of a huge sculptural hair-work refer to a wig? Does it refer to the history of drag performance? Or is it a glamorous prop? A minimalist object becomes a stage, and the visitor suddenly participates in a narrative that hints towards an alternative future.
Photo Credit: Francesco Galli; Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia