Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz – Silent Speeches

Funded artists: Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz

Exhibition Opening: 21 November, 18:00 - 21.00; 18:30: Activation of the exhibition through performance, curated by Voin de Voin: Jana Pencheva, Elitsa Mateva, Viktor Stransky, Voin de Voi

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz have been working together since 2007. In their films and installations, they question traditional behavioural norms through unusual actions, compositions and postures. The choreography of their works is unexpected and magical. The artists refer to the French-Caribbean poet, scholar and activist Édouard Glissant, who developed the idea of the right to opacity as a resistance to excessive categorisation and violent forms of ‘understanding’. Indeed, their artistic means insist on the inclusion of fantasy, of the inviolability of the personal, which is threatened by the pressure for transparency. This is why their works often leave the unsettling feeling that not everything is fully revealed.

The video installation "Moving Backwards" with the performers Julie Cunningham, Werner Hirsch, Latifa Laâbissi, Marbles Jumbo Radio and Nach is a central part of the installation, which was already shown in the Swiss Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. The camera moves tirelessly from right to left and from left to right at the same pace. Some steps, solos and group dances are danced backwards, others are digitally reversed. For example, a dancer performs their dance backwards. The film material is then reversed again in post-production. In other moments, only the music is reversed. All of this creates doubt and temporal ambiguity, as you never know whether you are seeing the past or the future of a movement. The film is inspired by the women of the Kurdish guerrilla movement who, to deceive the enemy, wore their shoes backwards as they walked from one end of the snowy mountains to the other - a tactic that saved their lives. It looks like they are walking backwards, but in reality they are walking forwards. And in the opposite direction. "Moving Backwards" combines postmodern choreography and urban dance with elements from queer underground culture.

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz often use microphones in their works. The video installation "Silent" from 2016 (shown at Sofia Art Projects Vol. 1, 2021, at Sofia Largo) shows a mute figure in front of a series of microphones - a symbol of silence, which can be an effect of repressive politics, but also an active form of resistance. In the Structura Gallery, the artists are showing several installations, one of which features microphones acquired in Bulgaria that bear traces of public speaking and singing during the socialist era. These works, which are neither sculptures nor props, seem to have stepped out of the film or to be waiting to be activated by a human artist/activist, or simply to hold public gatherings among themselves.