Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz

Silent, 2016
HD video, 7 min.

Collective reading of letters by Majd Abdel Hamid, Pauline Boudry, Laura Huertas Millán, Zoe Leonard, Renate Lorenz and Trevor Yeung, screening of Boudry / Lorenz’s Moving Backwards (HD video, 23 min., 2019), and conversation with Zoe Leonard

Poster, Bus stop project

 

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz have been working together in Berlin since 2007. They produce objects and installations that choreograph the tension between visibility and opacity. Their films are performance-based, including the camera and animated objects as additional performers, upsetting the separation between stage and backstage.

As part of the phenomenon 5 exhibition, the duo presented their work Silent (2016). The video starts with an interpretation of John Cage‘s score 4’33” which is conceived for any instrument and instructs its performer(s) not to play their instrument(s). Musician Aérea Negrot performs the score on a rotating stage, placed on Oranienplatz, a public square in Berlin where a refugee protest camp took place between 2012 and 2014. Later, she performs a song, which has been composed for the film. Silence has been described either as a violent experience, as in being silenced, or as a powerful performative act of resistance. Silent asks how both moments are intertwined. It focuses on the performance of a silent act, which might allow for agency, strength and even pleasure without erasing the traces of violence and vulnerability.

Αs part of the phenomenon 5 public program, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz also presented at the Port, next to Cafe Florans their video work Moving Backwards (2019), which explores resistance practices, combining post-modern choreography and urban dance with guerrilla techniques and elements of queer underground culture. It was preceded by a collective reading of letters relating to the themes of the work by Majd Abdel Hamid, Pauline Boudry, Laura Huertas Millán, Zoe Leonard, Renate Lorenz and Trevor Yeung, and followed by a conversation with Zoe Leonard. Starting from the works they presented within the framework of phenomenon 5, the three artists discussed, among other things, the notion of inverted space and time and how these can allow us to re-imagine the present and the future otherwise.