Stages brings together Pauline Boudry’s and Renate Lorenz’s most acclaimed exhibitions of the last decade. Boudry and Lorenz have developed their artistic position by staging constellations, shared moments of resistance, songs, speeches, objects, and appearances of queer kinship, thus recreating the figure of the artist in the plural. The duo’s numerous film installations feature artists and choreographers, whose own practices strongly resonate in the emerging productions—as do the objects: in the book’s central essay Elizabeth Lebovici speaks of their agency and even “revenge”, playing out in the memorable encounters with and between hair, chains, stages, smoke, and microphones, among other things. Boudry / Lorenz’s film installations and sculptures experiment with aesthetic forms that challenge assumptions about liveness, past and future, the camera’s gaze, and visibility and opacity, while insisting on the incessant creation of politics beyond oppositional formats, ways “of politically rethinking the world, of going beyond or beneath this principle of emancipation that colonialist modernity has staged and neoliberalism has commercialized in the losses and profits of personal risk” (Elizabeth Lebovici).
Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz have been working together in Berlin since 2007. Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu is a curator, writer and educator living in Berlin.
