Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz
Patriarchal Poetry
27 September–24 November 2013
Atrium:
Slow Runner: Her Noise Archive II
Opening: 26 September, 7pm
Badischer Kunstverein
Waldstraße 3
76133 Karlsruhe, Germany
The Badischer Kunstverein presents the first institutional solo exhibition of Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz in Germany. The exhibition centers around their newly produced film To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation (2013), which was made in cooperation with the Badischer Kunstverein and will be shown here for the first time. This film is accompanied by the film installations Toxic (2012) and Salomania (2009).
In their primarily filmic works, the two artists deal with the emergence of photography and film against the backdrop of colonial history and the invention of body norms. Historical photographs, texts or songs become the starting point for their search for alternative (sexual) practices and ways of living, conjoining with subversive approaches from pop, glamour, and camp.
Boudry/Lorenz’s films show performances for the camera, which are only indirectly encountered by the audience through the film projection. At the same time, projected films or images often form the stage background for these filmed performances, so that the different levels overlap. The filmic illusion is broken again and again in the works by Boudry/Lorenz, as the performers look or speak directly into the camera and the director or the camera itself comes into the picture.
The new film To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation takes as a starting point a score with the same title by the avant-garde composer Pauline Oliveros from 1970. The piece is performed by the six musicians Rachel Aggs, Peaches, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Catriona Shaw, Verity Susman, and William Wheeler. The composition, which Oliveros says was influenced by Valerie Solanas’s radical feminist “SCUM Manifesto,” affords the musicians an equal role, rejecting the hierarchical structures of traditional music. The artists are especially interested in the question of “whether and how changing structures engenders queer relations, whether musical and filmic forms and materials can become revolutionary.” Entirely in keeping with the exhibition title Patriarchal Poetry, which quotes a poem by Gertrude Stein, this involves queer politics starting from the history of aesthetics.
Curated by Anja Casser and Nadja Quante
Supported by Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council
The film installation To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation is funded by Stiftung Kunstfonds and produced with the support of Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, Electra in London, and Les Complices in Zurich.
A publication is planned to follow the exhibition in collaboration with CAPC, Bordeaux, Electra, London, and Les Complices, Zurich.
Taking the form of moving-image work and rarely shown archival material, Slow Runner: Her Noise Archive II brings together new and existing content from the Her Noise Archive, circling, referencing and extending links to Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz’s new film To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation (2013) and pioneering composer Pauline Oliveros’s eponymous 1970 score. During the ’70s Oliveros’s feminist philosophies of music not only radically challenged the patriarchal Western musical canon, but also the parallel ‘women’s music’ of the feminist movement by interrogating the notion of the ‘performer,’ the ‘audience,’ and the very meanings and forms of music itself. These rich tensions are explored through a series of contemporaneous works on display from Barbara Hammer, Lis Rhodes, Robert Ashley and others, whilst a new series of posters by New York-based artist Emma Hedditch creates a spatial manifestation of fragments from these histories and the wider archive.
This display of works is accompanied by a selection from the Her Noise Archive, a multi-annual research project and study collection initially founded in 2001 by Lina Dzuverovic and Anne Hilde Neset, which includes records, CDs, tapes, moving image, books, catalogues, magazines, fanzines, and exclusive interview material by artists who work with sound and experimental music such as Kim Gordon, Christina Kubisch, and Kevin Blechdom. The archive—accessible for the public at CRiSAP, London College of Communication—is a physical manifestation of the desire to draw lines of affinity between different moments of the avant-garde, from the radical contemporary composition of Oliveros to No Wave, riot grrrl and other more contemporary experimentations in sound and feminism.
Curated by Fatima Hellberg and Irene Revell, Electra, London.
In collaboration with Electra, London, and CRiSAP, London College of Communication.
Kindly supported by LUX, London.
Electra is funded by Arts Council England.
www.electra-productions.com
hernoise.org
www.crisap.org
Talks & events
Thursday, 14 November, 7pm
Lecture by Kerstin Stakemeier
Saturday, 23 November, 7pm
Artists talk with Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz
Saturday, 23 November, 8:30pm
Performances by Antonia Baehr & William Wheeler
Scores for Laughter and Without You I’m Nothing
