Boudry Lorenz: Moving Backwards
1206 S. Maple Ave, Suite 715 Los Angeles, California 90015
Saturday, December 7 at 7:00 PM 9:00 PM
Ends Feb 16, 2020
JOAN is pleased to present Berlin-based duo Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz’s video installation, Moving Backwards, in its U.S. premiere. Starting with the feeling of being pushed backwards by recent reactionary back-lashes, Moving Backwards explores resistance practices, combining post-modern choreography and urban dance with guerrilla techniques and elements of queer underground culture. A film installation with five performers from diverse dance backgrounds complicates the notion of backwards movements and their temporal and spatial meaning. Parts of the walks, solos and group dances are carried out backwards, others are digitally reversed, creating doubt and ambiguities for the installation on the whole. In an environment that the artists call an abstract club, the uncanny experience of temporal and spatial insecurity is complemented by a moment of reflection on the planetary politics of Moving Backwards with letters written to the audience in a newspaper by a number of artists, choreographers, activists and scholars. Choreography/performance : Julie Cunningham, Werner Hirsch, Latifa Laâbissi, Marbles Jumbo Radio, Nach. Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz have been working together in Berlin since 2007. They produce installations that choreograph the tension between visibility and opacity. Their films capture performances in front of the camera, often starting with a song, a picture, a film or a score from the near past. They upset normative historical narratives and conventions of spectatorship, as figures and actions across time are staged, layered and re-imagined. Their performers are choreographers, artists and musicians, with whom they are having a long-term conversation about the conditions of performance, the violent history of visibility, the pathologization of bodies, but also about companionship, glamour and resistance. Their most recent work, Moving Backwards, featuring choreographers/performers Latifa Laâbissi, Werner Hirsch, Julie Cunningham, Marbles Jumbo Radio and Nach premiered at the Swiss Pavillon of the 58th Venice Biennale. Telepathic Improvisation with performance by Marwa Arsanios, MPA, Ginger Brooks Takahashi and Werner Hirsch, premiered in 2017 at Participant, New York.  Silent with performance by Aérea Negrot, premiered at the Biennale of Moving Image in Geneva in November 2016. In 2015 I Want with performance by Sharon Hayes, was shown in their solo show at Kunsthalle Zürich and Nottingham Contemporary. Recent solo exhibitions have included Ongoing Experiments with Strangeness at the Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin, Telepathic Improvisation at the Centre Culturel Suisse Paris (2018) and CAMH Houston (2017), Portrait of an Eye at Kunsthalle Zürich (2015)  Loving, Repeating at Kunsthalle Wien (2015) Patriarchal Poetry at Badischer Kunstverein (2013), Aftershow at CAPC Bordeaux (2013), Toxic Play in Two Acts at South London Gallery (2012), and Contagieux! Rapports contre la normalité at the Centre d´Art Contemporain Geneva (2011).   Their work has been written about by writers and critics including Andre Lepecki, Mason Leaver-Yap, Gregg Bordowitz, Antke Engel, Nana Adusei-Poku, Mathias Danbolt, Ellen Feiss and Laura Guy. Their most recent catalogue Telepathic Improvisation (2018) was published by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, I Want was published by Sternberg Press (2016), Aftershow was published by Sternberg Press (2014), and Temporal Drag was published by Hatje Cantz in 2011.