Loretta Fahrenholz: 3 Frauen
(3 Women)
August 29–November 8, 2015
Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz are among the artists who engage in an archaeology of queer culture with extraordinary precision and critical foresight. Conceiving performances for the camera, they create a dense network, referencing experimental film, the history of photography, and underground (drag) performance to develop pioneering forms of activist aesthetics. Their films reveal the mechanisms of oppression and discrimination, while simultaneously making the emancipatory power of desire and transgression tangible. Works such as To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation (2013), Opaque (2014), and I Want (2015) develop a historical consciousness based on the belief that transgender and drag culture, embodiment and performance, desire and transgression are all a means for knowledge as well as an open and experimental way of better understanding the world.
Loretta Fahrenholz is an artist and filmmaker who lives between New York and Berlin. She investigates different social milieus and the various fictions and desires that are played out, with whatever degree of intention, among actors, narratives, and the given means of production. In this, Fahrenholz gives equal importance to the act of manipulating a set of circumstances and the condition of allowing herself to be manipulated by them. She often references specific genres (e.g., disaster flicks, documentary, porn) allowing for narrative and formal contradictions to emerge that, in turn, simultaneously encourage and impede identification. This dynamic is echoed on a thematic level: In Fahrenholz’s films, isolated bodies attempt to function as a community. Sometimes they succeed, and sometimes they don’t.
In this exhibition, 3 Frauen (3 Women), Fahrenholz shows two films: Ditch Plains (2013), a streetstyle sci-fi film set in post-Sandy NYC; and Implosion (2011), an adaption of the eponymous play by poet and feminist Kathy Acker (1947–97). Also on view will be two new series of photographs: the serial smartphone work “Recently Deleted,” and a set of spatial surveys of a farm in Bavaria created using an industrial 3-D point scanner.
Press information: Friday, August 28, 10am
All press material and texts on the films of both exhibitions can be downloaded on our website.
Theory & programs
The exhibitions include a special art education and event program, which will be announced in detail on our website.
Kunsthalle Zürich receives generous funding from Stadt Zürich Kultur; Kanton Zürich Fachstelle Kultur; Zürcher Kantonalbank – Partner of Kunsthalle Zürich; and LUMA Foundation.
