Pauline Boudry (CH) & Renate Lorenz (DE)
Residency period: September-November 2024
Based in Berlin, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz have been collaborating since 2007. With an artistic practice ranging from the production of objects and installations to filmmaking, the two artists attempt to choreograph the tension between the visibility and invisibility of bodies. Working from events, figures, and documents of the past, their film works offer a contemporary representation of these archives in the form of filmed performances, often imagined as a set design or installation. By revisiting these historical narratives through the prism of pathologization, camaraderie, glamour, and resistance, and through a staging that disrupts the conventions of spectatorship, the duo present bodies capable of transcending the ages and weaving links between them.
Their most recent works have been exhibited at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid (2022/23), the Whitechapel Gallery in London (2022), the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven (2022), the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne (2022), the FRAC Bretagne in Rennes (2021), the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2021), and the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2021). In 2019, Boudry and Lorenz presented their film installation Moving Backwards at the Swiss Pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale.
Drawing on the writings of American anthropology professor Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, who focuses on the collaboration of each species to survive in the ruins of capitalism, and on the decolonial work of Martinique poet and activist Édouard Glissant on the entanglement of beings and environments, their residency project La Relation will attempt to delve deeper into the notion of being in relationship with the “other”, be it a person, a creature, an object, time, or even the weather. Through discussion and experimentation, Boudry and Lorenz will seek to explore and understand how unpredictability can become a fundamental constituent in their artistic practice, and thus further define their creative process.
Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, photo Bernadette Paassen