Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz present their new film-installations:
“No Future” and “No Past”
Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz present their new film-installations: “No Future” (Super 16mm/HD, 15 min) and “No Past” (Super 16mm/HD, 15 min)
in:
Chewing the Scenery, part of Switzerland’s official participation in the 54th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia. Teatro Fondamenta Nuove, Venice, until October 2, 2011,
curated by Andrea Thal
and:
Art 42 Basel/Art Statements: Booth S 07 with Ellen de Bruijne Projects
15–19 June 2011, Basel
The No Future and No Past film-installations both work on punk archives from the period between 1976 and 2031, investigating the radical negativity, the self-destructiveness and the dystopia of these moments.
The title No Future quotes the punk movement’s demand for ‘no future’ and thus the film takes up the paradoxical premise that we are already in the future, which–according to the temporal ultimatum issued by the punk movement would never come about. The second title No Past ironically demands an abolishment of the past, though the past is considered the basis of the human psyche but also of subjectivity and thus of the existence of human beings in general. No Future and No Past will push this reflection on the relationship between the past and future a little bit further, short-circuiting a linear, or evolutionary conception of time.
While the frame of a film image usually picks up important visual elements while omitting less important ones, No Past and No Future turn such validations and conventions of film history upside down. Referring to the legendary ‘Ridiculous Theatre’, and the work of Deleuze/Guattari, the film theoretician Marc Siegel qualified the queer politics of the art practice of Boudry/Lorenz as ‘becoming ridiculous’. “A ridiculous critique is not merely unreasonable and hilarious. It also questions rigidities of identity (gender, sexual, racial, and human) and displays a belief in process, style, and fabulation over product, virtuosity, and truth”. (Marc Siegel)
The work by the Berlin-based Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz (Switzerland, 1972 / Germany, 1963) often revisit practices and materials from the past, referring to forgotten moments of queerness in history. Their work produce a mode of ‘speaking backwards’ or a ‘queer archaeology’ and it incorporates figures which are not only able to cross different times, but also draw relations in between time, thus revealing possibilities for a queer futurity.
No Future (16mm / HD Video, 15 min.) and No Past (16mm / HD Video, 15 min.), 2011
films by Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz
Performers: Ginger Brooks Takahashi as Darby Crash, Fruity Franky as Poly Styrene, choreographer Werner Hirsch, Olivia Anna Livki as Alice Bag, G. Rizo as Joey Ramone
Director of Photography: Bernadette Paassen.
Boudry/Lorenz previous films are Normal Work (2007), N.O. body (2008), Salomania (2009) Charming for the Revolution (2009) and Contagious (2010). They had solo shows in Centre d’Art, Geneve, Les Complices, Zurich, The Swiss Institute, New York and Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam o/a.
Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS
Rozengracht 207 A
NL-1016 LZ Amsterdam
The Netherlands
+31(0)20 5304994
+31(0)6 49485207
edbprojects [at] cs.com
www.edbprojects.nl
www.chewingthescenery.net
www.boudry-lorenz.de
