Berlin-based artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz are in residence at EMPAC to produce a new moving-image work with the performers/artists Marwa Asanios, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Werner Hirsch and MPA.
Boudry / Lorenz have been working together since 2004/2007. Since the beginning Werner Hirsch has been performing in their work. Their staged films and film installations often start with a song, a picture, a film, or a script from the past. They produce performances for the camera, staging the actions of individuals and groups living—indeed thriving—in defiance of normality, law, and economics. Their films upset normative historical narratives, as figures from across time are staged, projected, and layered. These performers are themselves choreographers, artists, and musicians, with whom Boudry and Lorenz engage in a long-term conversation about performance, the meaning of visibility since early modernity, the pathologization of bodies, and also about glamour and resistance.
Recent solo exhibitions have included Portrait of an Eye, Kunsthalle Zürich, 2015; Loving, Repeating, Kunsthalle Wien, 2015; Patriarchal Poetry, Badischer Kunstverein, 2013; Aftershow, CAPC, Bordeaux, 2013; Toxic Play in Two Acts, South London Gallery, 2012; Contagieux! Rapports contre la normalité, Centre d´Art Contemporain, Geneva, 2011. They published the catalogue Temporal Drag by Hatje Cantz in 2011, and Aftershow was published by Sternberg Press in 2014.