October 17, 2025–February 1, 2026
Chelsea Manning stands alone on the stage. She cradles a pair of headphones to her ear and leans over her decks to match the beat of the next song, absorbed in the music. The camera pulls discreetly back to reveal that the windowless club in which she is playing is empty. As the angle widens, a woman who once spent a year in solitary confinement in a military prison looks increasingly isolated. She dances awkwardly beneath the flashing lights, having perhaps remembered that she is being filmed, before gently punching the air and slipping offstage. The screen blacks out, the house lights flash on, and the audience moves on to the next room.
All the things she said (2025) is the keystone of Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz’s tightly choreographed exhibition of videos and sculptures at the Istituto Svizzero, and the most succinct expression of their ongoing enquiry into the nature of performance, representation, privacy, and freedom. It might seem counterintuitive to represent the world’s most famous advocate for state transparency and trans visibility through an aspect of her personality that is incidental to the remarkable achievements for which she is celebrated. But that Manning is an entirely unremarkable DJ—delivering straightforward hard-house remixes of queer club classics from t.A.T.u. to Haddaway—is integral to the work’s effect, meaning that this portrait of an historical personage can also function as a study in what Michael Fried termed “absorption,” but which might also be called escape.
Whether it is any longer possible, or responsible, to “lose oneself” in art is a question with which many of us will recently have grappled. The destruction of our attention by social media, allied to the fear that to look away even for a moment from the diverse atrocities now screening on our phones might make us complicit in them, has made it not only difficult but even ethically suspect to focus our minds on “purely” aesthetic and intellectual pursuits. Yet here is Chelsea Manning, whom no one could accuse of quiescence or complicity, immersed in the process of making music for the benefit of no one but herself.
In an interview presented on a box monitor in a neighboring room, Manning, shorn of the LED kitten ears that she wears when performing, explains the role that music has played in her life. A small transistor radio helped her, she tells us, to endure the conditions of her incarceration by allowing her momentarily to transcend them. “To be an artist” allows you, in her experience, to “delve deep inside yourself” and thereby to “survive” the depredations of a hostile world. That art might serve a social function simply by offering a space in which persecuted individuals can take refuge—alone or together—is a familiar argument, if one worth repeating in the current climate. Yet by presenting this video on a wooden structure painted with trompe l’oeil reproductions of Rome’s queer bars, Boudry and Lorenz make a more expansive point about what it means to be an artist, and who gets to be one.
It is not the music Manning makes that will define her in the popular imagination or historical record. Yet when she dons kitten ears and takes to the stage she is an artist, figured not as a fixed personal or professional identity but a role to be inhabited with the aid of props like those represented here by sculptures made of synthetic hair (Wig Piece [Right Body, Wrong Time] V and VIII, 2025) and microphones (Microphone Piece [unconscious rehearsal], 2023). The implication is that anyone can be an artist for the duration of the time they are dancing, or dressed up, or absorbed in a novel, or pursuing any creative activity that takes them momentarily out of the conventional structures of space and time by which their lives are shaped.
If we are apt to describe art as transporting us to another “place,” then Boudry and Lorenz seem equally interested by the access it provides to alternative temporalities. This is dramatized by the video installation (No) Time (2020), which shows four dancers of diverse styles and talents performing on a black stage entered by way of a transparent sliding screen like a camera shutter. They move in and out of sync with each other and the music, as if obeying different tempos, and are at intervals obscured from view by mechanical blinds that fall from the ceiling of the exhibition space.
The work creates an illusion of naturalism—the first impression is of a single fluid take, with the dancers moving in and out of frame—that repeated viewings reveal to be painstakingly constructed. This is consistent with an exhibition that extols the freedom of individuals not to conform by strictly controlling the experience of its audience. The video works spread across the Villa Maraini’s six rooms play consecutively, in a determined order separated by intervals during which the lights flicker, meaning that viewers must collectively follow a set route through the space (the show lasts around eighty minutes, and it is surprisingly liberating to leave an exhibition safe in the knowledge that you have devoted the proper amount of time to it). Boudry and Lorenz have cited both experimental theater and the Berlin club scene as inspirations, and the quasi-utopian space they establish here is likewise dependent on the audience’s tacit observation of certain behavioral protocols. This concept of freedom is predicated not on the abolition of all rules, but on their creative reconfiguration to serve the bodies that are bound by them.
Performance does not therefore “dissolve” the oppositions that structure this exhibition—between freedom and constraint, visibility and privacy, theatricality and authenticity, self-expression and political action—so much as set them into dynamic new arrangements. This requires that its works succeed not only as cleverly engineered statements of abstract principles but as affective experiences that resist any such easy rationalization. On these terms, El Cristal Es Mi Piel (Glass is my skin, 2025) stands out. This twelve-minute video sets the late Venezuelan musician Aérea Negrot in Madrid’s Palacio de Cristal, a modernist glass architecture constructed in 1887 to display the culture of Spain’s territories in the Philippines. Armed with only a microphone, she drifts between mirrored platforms and hissing smoke machines, singing lyrics about transparency and disclosure that are elevated by a haunting melody and her extraordinary voice. It is only towards the end of the performance, as this monument to the colonial gaze fills with a white cloud into which Negrot disappears, that you notice she has abandoned the microphone. She no longer, it seems, has need of the prop.
