Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz

For their fifth solo at the gallery, Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz present a video installation and a group of new chain and hair sculptures.
The film installation “All The Things She Said” shows anti-war activist Chelsea Manning, who has long been an inspiration for the artists. Instead of following up on what one might expect her to do, namely delivering a speech on leaking material about US war atrocities in Iraq or supporting young trans people in the US, Chelsea Manning turns to music.

We see her playing a DJ set in an empty venue in Berlin, Schwuz, the oldest club for queer and trans people in Germany. The sound has been recorded with multiple microphones, highlighting the importance of each sonic perspective in the collective experience of listening, dancing and celebrating.

In “All The Things She Said”, sound arrives with a potential for queerness, a force of forming togetherness despite war and repression, or, in Chelsea Manning’s words: We tend to sound to connect, where things are unspeakable. We tend to sound because we crave pleasure and getting back that amber optimism.

In addition to this performance-based video installation, the duo’s sculptures draw on the tension between speaking out as a means of liberation and remaining silent as a powerful form of resistance. In these works, sound and silence convey a queer potential in practical terms: a non-identitarian force for creating community.

The gallery show coincides with the artists’ first solo in Mexico, “All The Things She Said” at MUAC – Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, and their participation in the Biennale Son [Sound Biennial] in Sion, Switzerland.