17/11/15
Portfolio: Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz
Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz: In Memoriam to Identity
Part of Autumn Season: Alien Encounters
Nottingham Contemporary
10 October – 31 December 2015
“By looking at forgotten or disavowed queer moments, affects, acts, or
leftovers, we not only want to (re)consider them as political interventions,
but also try to re-create the past in order to articulate a contemporary
desire,” explain the artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, who have been working
together in Berlin since 2007. “Our works often revisit materials from the past
– a score, a piece of music, a film, a photograph or a performance – wondering
about and excavating unrepresented or illegible moments. We work with
performance to create embodiments, which are able to conflate different times,
drawing relations between these times” – a process they refer to as “temporal
drag”.
The duo’s performances take place very much for the camera, which is
often explicitly acknowledged by the performer. There is no attempt to
disillusion viewers into believing that the performers have become anyone else
– it is much more about their interaction and connection with the historical
objects and becoming, as Boudry puts it, a moving photograph.
Boudry and Lorenz’s films are often very fragmentary, with the music
abruptly edited, underlining the duo’s artistic direction. The performances
raise questions about the meaning of visibility, bodily pathologisation, glamour,
resistance and the very nature of performance itself.