Portfolio: Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz

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.

Published in the December 2015 print issue of DIVA magazine