Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz

Walls, floors, fabrics, blinds, and glass. Light and smoke. Dark and opaque, matte, shiny, transparent, or semi-reflective surfaces. Black boxes cropped by the frame of the camera’s glass eye, which also dances. Chains and wigs in unlikely places, colorful shoes, inverted, facing two directions at once. The front is the back is the front is the back. The editing comes and goes, sneakily, mirroring the timeline without ever revealing its turning points. The end is the beginning is the end is the beginning. So is the choreographic displacement of these pieces: multidirectional. Exercises to throw off the gaze that, conditioned to linearity, expects to find progressive time and spatial continuity. Rehearsals for guerrilla warfare and escape on the portable dance floor that are the bodies. To remain in shadow by choice, to disappear. To turn the focus of light outward, to dazzle the eye of the beholder.

The video-installations presented by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz experiment with space-temporalities not measurable by Newtonian physics. The progressive, hierarchical linearity (something is always behind, or below, or in the past) that governs the modern view on matter collapses. Both the movement of the performers and the visual and filmic elements of the works are governed by paradoxes that are foundational in the lives of minorities: the congruence between hypervisibility and opacity, transparency and reflexivity. Here it is possible to move in more than one direction simultaneously. Filmic bodies and dancing bodies deconfigure the pre-established political-cultural conditionings and become similar to the subatomic dynamics that also constitute them. We enter the quantum sphere, where everything exists in inexhaustible dimensions moving in infinite directions; where everything is essentially non-locatable and, therefore, uncapturable; where one can, finally freed from the bonds of time, imagine other worlds.

miro spinelli
translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz are an artist duo who have worked together since 2006. They produce film installations that revisit recent and past material (a score, a piece of music, a film, a photograph or a performance), with a particular focus on the  critical history of the photographic and moving image itself. The duo works with performance to create embodiments which are able to conflate different times and they often create illegitimate collaborations – partly fictitious, partly cross-temporal. 

This participation is supported by The Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia and Consulado Geral da República Federal da Alemanha.