Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz
Everybody talks about the weather… We don’t
June 3–July 16 2017
Opening: Friday June 2 2017, 7–9pm
Participant Inc.
253 E Houston St # 1
New York, NY 10002
Walker Art Center
Moving Image Commissions
Online: June 15–September 10 2017
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH)
5216 Montrose Blvd
Houston, TX 77006
September 16, 2017–January 7, 2018
Opening: Friday, September 15, 6:30–9pm
Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz present their first US solo exhibition Everybody talks about the weather… We don’t. It includes a major new moving image work—Telepathic Improvisation—and two new sculptures.
With reference to current violent social conditions 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. While the action of the film appears abstract, it nonetheless includes references to specific moments of 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. The audience is called to communicate telepathically with all of the elements on screen including performers Marwa Arsanios, Werner Hirsch, MPA, and Ginger Brooks Takahashi. 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? When a minimalist object becomes a stage, the visitor is invited to participate in a narrative that hints towards an alternative future.
This exhibition is presented 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 will stream online on the Walker Art Center’s Moving Image Commissions page. The exhibition will be 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.
Events at EMPAC will soon be announced on their website.
This project is 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.
