PAULINE BOUDRY / RENATE LORENZ

(THU, DEC 16th, 2021- 16:00-20:00 SOFT OPENING)
The exhibition is open to the public in compliance with Covid-19 regulations.

curated by Ivana Marjanović

Silent Manifesto presents three film installations, The Right to have Rights (2019), Silent (2016) and Opaque (2014), choreographed in interaction with each other specifically for the exhibition in Kunstraum Innsbruck. The installation stages a conversation between the art works around transparency and opacity, becoming invisible and speaking up. Working between silence, speech, music, camouflage, state of war and asylum, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz create images of aesthetics and politics with attention to ambiguities and paradoxes.

A deserted public bath becomes a “safe house” and a performance stage for a group of fugitive activists, while the scene begins to disappear behind a set of curtains and dense smoke (Opaque). A musician interprets John Cage‘s score 4´33 by performing silence and subsequently a song on complicity, terror and transgender survival at the site where the refugee protest camp took place (Silent). In a neon green “uniform,” at an airport’s runway, a person performs the text of the 1951 International Refugee Convention, while human speech is slowly transformed into a composition of electronic music (The Right To Have Rights).

Can silence be either an effect of oppression and a powerful performative act of resistance? How can we let smoke enter into our relationships, deeply blurring the desire for understanding, for walls of separation and enclosure, for a proper enemy?

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz work with video and film that is strongly intertwined with performance: on the one hand they introduce protagonists who are musicians, choreographers, artists, and activists as performers, and on the other hand they situate performances at the boundaries between the stage and off-stage. The imaginary interacts with the real, which situates their practice in the space between conceptual art, queer culture and social movements. The performers, such as Aérea Negrot (Silent), Ginger Brooks Takahashi and Werner Hirsch (Opaque) or MPA (The Right to have Rights) are the artists’ companions. The art works by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz resonate with the artistic production processes that involve, invite, and challenge. The works presented at Kunstraum Innsbruck bring with them a set of references that create an intertextual reading of the artists’ propositions and historical works by John Cage, Édouard Glissant, Jean Genet among others.

Alongside the films presented on transparent and semitransparent screens where the audience also becomes part of the “stage”, there is an accompanying installation made of artificial hair, Wig Piece (I Feel My Story´s Still Untold) 2021. The object evokes a moment of in-between, between artificiality and naturalness, of connecting to bodies and to the history of sculpture. Placed on the wall, the Wig Piece could signify something that is beyond femininity, drag, or trans-identity; be a sign of refusal and resistance to being categorized; as well as another link to strategies of in/visibility.

Text: Ivana Marjanović

ARTISTS STATEMENTS / ABOUT ART WORKS

Opaque
Installation with super 16mm / HD, 10 min. 2014
Performance: Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Werner Hirsch

A curtain, two performers, inside the remnants of an old public swimming pool. The performers claim to be representatives of an underground organization. The curtain is set up for their anonymity. The public is long gone, the place seems abandoned. Once the curtain is removed, another one appears. This one, pink zebra, fuses the war technique of camouflage with the stylishness of homo-outfits and becomes a showcase for the entrance of large amounts of smoke. The dense smoke perhaps stems from bombings, or it is set off as a signal during a political demonstration. Later a speech is delivered, based on a text by Jean Genet. Its topic? The desire for a proper faultless enemy. It opens up the question of how to move forward in a war or a fight for resistance without any declared and ‘visible’ enemy. Do the curtains and fumes grant the "right to opacity" (Édouard Glissant) to the bodies that they mask and disguise? Or do they blur the dividing lines between same and other, between accomplices and enemies?

Director of Photography: Bernadette Paassen
Sound: Johanna Wienert
Set Photography: Andrea Thal
Color Correction: Matthias Behrens (Waveline)
Sound Design: Rashad Becker

Silent
Installation with HD, 7 min., 2016
Performance: Aérea Negrot

Silent starts with an interpretation of John Cage‘s score 4´33´´ from 1952. The score is conceived for any instrument and instructs its performer(s) not to play their instrument(s) during the entire duration of the three parts of 30‘‘, 2‘23‘‘ and 1‘40‘‘. The 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. In a second part of the film she sings 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, as it has been carried out by various disobedience movements around the world. 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. The film suggests a dialogue between being silent and sounding rather than seeing them as mutually excluding.

Music by Miguel Toro and Aérea Negrot
Director of Photography: Bernadette Paassen
Sound: Felix Andriessens
Make-up: Nuria de Lario
Color Correction: Matthias Behrens (Waveline)
Sound Design: Rashad Becker

The Right To Have Rights
Installation with HD, 8 min., 2019
Performance: MPA

The Right to Have Rights shows a performer who speaks the text of the so-called 1951 Geneva Convention (Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees), a protocol by which 145 states guaranteed wide-ranging rights to people on refuge and which in theory is still valid at present. Instead of delivering this statement in a lecture hall and addressing an audience, it is here re-located to an empty runway at the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin. The performer’s speech has been partially altered through digital processing and turned into a piece of electronic music or into a song, even though this song is by someone human but not quite. Who is seen as "human" and who can access rights?

Director of photography: Bernadette Paassen
Drone operator and DP assistant: Daniel Liepke
Sound: Claudia Mattai del Moro
Make-up: Nuria de Lario
Color Grading: Waveline
Sound design: Rashad Becker

PAULINE BOUDRY AND RENATE LORENZ
are filmmakers and visual artists who have been working together in Berlin since 2007. Recent solo exhibitions at Frac Bretagne (2021); Julia Stoschek Collection (2019), Berlin; The Swiss Pavillon of the 58th Venice Biennale (2019); Centre Culturel Suisse Paris (2018); CAMH Houston (2017); Kunsthalle Zürich (2015) Kunsthalle Wien (2015); Badischer Kunstverein (2013); CAPC Bordeaux (2013); South London Gallery (2012); Centre d´Art Contemporain Geneva (2011). Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz took part in numerous festivals and group exhibitions among others recently at The Centre Pompidou (2021); Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2021).

More information: www.boudry-lorenz.de

KUNSTRAUM INNSBRUCK is annually supported by the City of Innsbruck, State Tirol, and the Federal Ministry Republic of Austria Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport. The exhibition by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz is additionally supported by Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council.

EVENTS DURING THE EXHIBITION

SOFTOPENING
16.12.2021, 16:00-20:00
SILENT MANIFESTO
under actual Covid-Measures 


GUIDED TOURS 
SILENT MANIFESTO

20.01.2022, 18:00
with Ivana Marjanović

11.02.2022, 17:00
with Ivana Marjanović

GUIDED TOUR/TALK
25.02.2022, 18:00
THE RIGHT TO HAVE RIGHTS
with Ivana Marjanović
in cooperation with the initiative Bürglkopf schließen