Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz: Improvisation télépathique / Tarik Hayward / Guillaume Pilet

Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz Improvisation télépathique (Telepathic Improvisation)
Opening: Friday, January 12, 6–9pm

Centre culturel suisse is pleased to present, for the first time in Europe, Improvisation télépathique (Telepathic Improvisation), installation and film by Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz.

With reference to current violent social conditions, Improvisation télépathique (Telepathic Improvisation) explores the ways in which others (including other objects) might become part of our striving for alternative political and sexual imaginations. Humans and non-humans, movements, speeches, gestures, music, light, and smoke interpret composer Pauline Oliveros’ 1974 score of the same title. The audience is invited to communicate telepathically with all of the elements on screen, including performers Marwa Arsanios, Werner Hirsch, MPA, and Ginger Brooks Takahashi.

While the action of the film appears abstract, it nonetheless includes references to leftist protest, queer S&M club life, acts of surveillance and, finally, fantasies of new relations between human and non-human objects in an interstellar dimension. A published text by Ulrike Meinhof appears—”From protest to resistance”—written in 1968 two years before Meinhof went underground and joined the RAF. The text marks the rise of leftist movements against the continuation of fascist and imperialist ideas in postwar Germany. Challenging the idea of images as mere depictions of (political) actions, this filmed performance speaks about productive tensions between the fantasy of an action and the action itself.

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.

Telepathic Improvisation was created as part of a year-long series of major presentations by Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz in the US, co-curated by Alhena Katsof in collaboration with the Walker Art Center’s Moving Image Commissions, Minneapolis; EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy; Participant Inc., New York; and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH). Following the film’s premiere and installation at Participant Inc., Telepathic Improvisation streamed online on the Walker Art Center’s Moving Image Commissions page. The exhibition was restaged in a new form at CAMH and accompanied by a catalogue with a newly commissioned essay by André Lepecki and contributions by the artists, Victoria Brooks, Dean Daderko, Lia Gangitano, Alhena Katsof, and Mason Leaver-Yap. This project was produced in partnership with the Goethe-Institut New York and generously supported by the Bentson Foundation, Service des affaires culturelles – Canton de Vaud, and ProHelvetia. 

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.
boudry-lorenz.de

Meanwhile, in the courtyard:

Tarik Hayward
Resolutions: zero. Hopes: zero.
Opening: Friday, January 12, 6–9pm
Tarik Hayward (born 1979, lives in the Canton of Vaud) likes playing with limits, habits, and (im)possibilities. His project for the courtyard of the Centre culturel suisse consists of erecting a wall, with a framework made of wood and a frontage made of printing plates recycled as construction material. By doing so, he emphasises the potential links between Gutenberg’s invention, which was instrumental in the massive propagation of information and knowledge, and political practices on the verge of extremism that find new echoes in our current time.
tarikhayward.tumblr.com
 

Guillaume Pilet
My Life as a Parade
Opening: Friday, February 23, 6–9pm
For My Life as a Parade, Guillaume Pilet (born 1984, lives in Lausanne) presents a series of forty autobiographical pencil, ink, and watercolour drawings. As noted by the artist himself, “any artist’s biography is narrated in a fictionalised way.” Therefore, Pilet tells his own in the model of a children’s story, and alternatively focuses on ephemeral memories, dramatic events, and short-lived anecdotes, all presented on parade floats, while a special device decorates the walls of the exhibition room.
guillaumepilet.com