Pauline Boudry&Renate Lorenz: (No) Time

In 2020 the international guest artists of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award were Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, who work together in Berlin since 2007. In collaboration with Boudry and Lorenz we prepared a European premiere of their new work (No) Time, which is co-produced by the Jindřich Chalupecký Society, Mediacity Seoul, Frac Bretagne and CA2M Madrid.

Boudry and Lorenz 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.

In the 20-minute film (No) Time the artists question whether movements can simultaneously connect to utopian aspiration and political despair. At a moment when we are increasingly confronted with right-wing conservatism, it seems urgent to disrupt progressive conceptions of time and create a stage for something beyond: what will a minoritarian mode of temporality look like? Four performers seem to be rehearsing for a queer time: extreme slowness, being out of synch, changes of rhythms, stillness and breaks are working on escape routes, refusing the deadening beats of labor and the state-sponsored hopeless bars of being. The performers employ and often deliberately mix a range of dance elements inspired by hip-hop, dancehall, (post-)modern dance and drag performance. Even though they noticeably differ in their styles, they connect through sudden similarities, haunting movements, and body memories, producing and shifting their points of contact. While the film's end is also its beginning, the sequence of scenes offers an unpredictable experience of time, not least by raising doubt about how far slowness and ruptures are carried out by the performing bodies or by digital means.

Besides presenting this new work in a solo exhibition at PLATO Ostrava, we have prepared a collateral screening in collaboration with the partner institution n.b.k. Berlin. Curators Krisztina Hunya (n.b.k.) and Karina Kottová (JCHs) selected films and videos from the Video Forum collection, which features more that 1700 moving image works by international and German artists, and include related works by Czech artists that contextualize formal and thematic approaches of Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, such as the relation of live performance and film or documentation, choreography of space and bodily experience, or politics of choreography. The screening will be presented at PLATO Ostrava during the Jury Weekend program.  

Pauline Boudry a Renate Lorenz are internationally established artists, who have presented their works in diverse notable contexts. In 2019 they have presented the project „Moving Backwards“ at the Swiss Pavillon during 58th Biennale di Venezia. Their most recent work, "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 "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).  

The exhibition is kindly supported by the Ministry of Culture, Czech Republic, Pro Helvetia, Czech-GermanFuture Fund and IFA – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, (No) Time, HD film, 20 min, 2020.

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, (No) Time, HD film, 20 min, 2020.

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, (No) Time, HD film, 20 min, 2020.

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, (No) Time, HD film, 20 min, 2020.

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, (No) Time, HD film, 20 min, 2020.

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, (No) Time, HD film, 20 min, 2020.

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, (No) Time, HD film, 20 min, 2020.

Photo: Tomáš Souček

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Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, (No) Time, HD film, 20 min, 2020.

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, (No) Time, HD film, 20 min, 2020.

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, (No) Time, HD film, 20 min, 2020.

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, (No) Time, HD film, 20 min, 2020.

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, (No) Time, HD film, 20 min, 2020.

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, (No) Time, HD film, 20 min, 2020.

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, (No) Time, HD film, 20 min, 2020.

Curatorial text

Exercising Queer Time 

The present moment isn’t very much in favor of physical bodies and their various forms of expression. Social distancing, home offices, distance education and all the other necessary restrictions related to the Covid-19 pandemic have mostly isolated bodies in small units, the ideal scenario being a single person in front of a computer screen, attempting to connect to whatever was left from work, social life, learning, culture, or physical exercise. The daily choreographies of such bodies changed rapidly. The spaces they usually inhabit and the trajectories they follow shrunk to the minimum. The time they occupy got a new rhythm, or rather rhythms, changing almost every day through new and new rules: pubs close at 12pm, at 8pm, altogether. Elementary schools stay open, universities close, all schools close. Large shops mostly remain in operation; as of course consumption never stops. The vicious side of online shopping reveals itself when Amazon reports nearly 20 000 of their workers having contracted Covid-19.  

You can dance, but you cannot sing; was in short another strange rule employed recently by the Czech government in their rather hopeless efforts to prevent the rapid spread of the virus. Singing became banned in public performances as well as non-professional activities. Social media were filled with posts recalling the 1952 Czech film fairy tale The Proud Princess, where a shoemaker daily runs to sing out his frustration beyond the border to the neighboring kingdom, as his own king, or rather his sneaky advisors, forced high taxes and fined those who attempted to melodize their voice (he goes: “Release me out of this cage, and I will sing every day”). When this tale unexpectedly became reality in the Czech Republic in autumn 2020, those doing theatre, dance, exhibitions or other cultural forms could still somewhat continue their efforts. A lockdown followed shortly after. 

The film (No) Time by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz is installed in PLATO Ostrava, patiently awaiting its premiere. The exhibition cannot open to the public due to current restrictions. It most probably will, one day, but nobody knows when exactly that day may come. In a week? In three months? The film’s rhythm cannot express the present moment better. Four performers moving and dancing through a disconnected space, something between a black box and an office building with automatic glass doors and sliding blinds. The performers employ captivating choreographies, stemming from diverse inspirational sources such as hip-hop, ballet, dancehall, drag performance or contemporary dance. They move from rapid rhythm to slow motion, from interaction to pause, often leaving the viewer uncertain as to whether the radical shifts in pace are still a matter of choreography or postproduction. Both the visual and sound components of the work are strongly shaped by metallic chains that become powerful extensions of the mostly black outfits, swirling with the dancers, dropping on the floor, captivating the viewer’s senses and enhancing the film’s physical presence. 

Through their moves, the performers appear to resist or escape the generic beats pushed on individuals through the division of work and “free” time, through the endless ticking of the capital-driven clock, through all the systems and structures they are expected to fit in and rules they need to follow in order to keep progressing. Already in their previous works, Boudry and Lorenz challenged the normative of our being in time and space, voicing the need to oppose the notion of progress not only through rational means, but also via our very bodies and their potential to become grounds for (political) engagement and non-conformist expression. Doing so, they build upon the various invocations of dance as a form of resistance, which has appeared in diverse geopolitical contexts and historical periods. Dance and performance has proved so many times already to be a powerful tool of activism, often going far beyond rational concepts and verbal slogans. Boudry and Lorenz recall this connection in a specific take, with a strong non-verbal appeal, with a touch of both minimalism and glamour, delicacy and exaggeration.  

In a moment like this, worrying and filled with uncertainties, perhaps it’s best to stop following the rhythm of the (bad) news, popping-up scandals, governmental attempts and failures, and devote ourselves to truly exercising an alternative and creative temporality, a “queer time”: exploring all the niches of our current resorts, escaping, returning, rearranging, having fun, voicing that we do not have fun, doing nothing, doing everything we didn’t have time to do, daring to say no, including what was excluded, stretching out, breathing in, breaking through, learning from others, listening to ourselves, talking to plants and furniture, employing our pets’ habits, accepting the mess, cleaning up, reducing, unlearning, imagining, re-imagining. We will most probably get back from the isolation at some point again, but it becomes more and more clear that substantial values of the “old world” will need to change if we wish to sustain on this planet without sliding from one crisis to another. That can sound as too big of a challenge, but through daily exercise, we might be able to prepare our bodies for transformation step by step. Protesting and shouting out for systemic changes is not enough at this point. We will need to embody what we truly hope for.