Renate Lorenz
Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz have been working together in Berlin since 2007. Their staged films and film installations often start with a song, a picture, a film or a script from the past. They produce performances for the camera, staging the actions of individuals and groups living — indeed thriving — in defiance of normality, law and economics. Their films upset normative historical narratives, as figures across time are staged, projected and layered. Their performers are choreographers, artists and musicians, with whom they are having a long-term conversation about performance, the meaning of visibility since early modernity, the pathologization of bodies, but also about glamour and resistance.
Their most recent work, I Want, with performance by Sharon Hayes, premiered in August 2015 at Kunsthalle Zürich and was comissioned by Kunsthalle Zürich and Nottingham Contemporary. In 2014, they produced Opaque, with performances by Werner Hirsch and Ginger Brooks Takahashi, which premiered at the Berlinale (Forum Expanded) in February 2015, and has been shown at Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam and Labf15 in Lyon. To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe, In Recognition of their Desperation (2013) is based on the eponymous 1970 score by avant-garde feminist composer Pauline Oliveros, filmed in Funkhaus Nalepastraße, the former GDR radio studios in Berlin, and featuring performances by the musicians Rachel Aggs, Peaches, Catriona Shaw, Verity Susman, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, and William Wheeler. The work had its premiere exhibition as part of their solo show Patriarchal Poetry at Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe in autumn 2013 and was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in a special event with the artists, Pauline Oliveros and Gregg Bordowitz in May 2014. Previous works include Toxic (2012), with performances by Werner Hirsch and Ginger Brooks Takahashi, commissioned for Intense Proximity, La Triennale, Paris 2012; No Future, No Past, commissioned by Andrea Thal for the Swiss off-site project, Chewing The Scenery, Venice Biennale, 2011; Charming for the Revolution, 2009; N.O.Body, 2008; Normal Work, 2007.
Recent solo exhibitions have included Portrait of an Eye, Kunsthalle Zürich, 2015, Loving, Repeating, Kunsthalle Wien, 2015, Patriarchal Poetry, Badischer Kunstverein, 2013, Aftershow, CAPC, Bordeaux, 2013; Toxic Play in Two Acts, South London Gallery, 2012; Contagieux! Rapports contre la normalité, Centre d´Art Contemporain, Geneva, 2011.
Their work has been written about by writers and critics including Gregg Bordowitz, Antke Engel, Nana Adusei-Poku and Mathias Danbolt. They published the catalogue Temporal Drag by Hatje Cantz in 2011, and their most recent catalogue Aftershow was published by Sternberg Press in 2014.
http://www.boudry-lorenz.de/