Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Portrait of a Movement

March 18th - August 20th, 2023

Tensta Konsthall

By WAC I 4 MAY 2023

Curated by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu, Portrait of a Movement is the proposal by the artist duo Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz. Two large film installations form the core in the exhibition: through enganging various dance movements and creating artistic collaborations, the artists take a closer look at abstraction as a counterforce against reactionary currents.

On stage, an intimate conversation takes place that soon turns into a Kammerspiel, in which different characters take turns using the stage. Slowly but powerfully, the right not to be seen, to be opaque, is being formulated in an age that demands transparency and increasingly relies on identification and identity checks as a tool of exclusion and normalisation. On stage there are opportunities to move forward and backward, the right to hide one's face, the right to go against the tide and change forms, the courage to grab the microphone and dare to put on the shoes of resistance.

How Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz conceive of the past —that is, as unfinished— both inspires and challenges the obsession with progress norming truths of our times. Rather than in sync with the constant incitement for progress, in moving oneself alternately a few steps backwards and a few forwards, maybe our history could be seen in a different light. Portrait of a Movement is the fruit of this. And it also responds to the new turn in Boudry / Lorenz's practice, which seeks pleasure, power and radical difference in alternate moments of history.

The exhibition is a result of a conversation that has been going on for some time between Boudry / Lorenz and Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu. The version shown in Stockholm is based on a dialogue between the film installation (No) Time (2021) and Moving Backwards (2019) which are reflected on the shiny, black dance floor on which foot prints from previous exhibitions are left as layers in a pattern.

Aside from the films, a kind of peculiar shoes are shown which have been used in Moving Backwards, the installation shown for the first time at the Swiss Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale.

The film installation (No) Time (2021) was produced during the pandemic for the exhibition at CA2M in Madrid in collaboration with FRAC Brétagne and Seoul Mediacity Biennial. At the same time Stages (Spector Books, 2022), was published, the first retrospective overview over the artist duo’s collaboration from fifteen years, seen through different objects and situations.

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