Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz
The Right to Have Rights
10 Mar - 08 May 2020
Exhibition view Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. The Right to Have Rights, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, 2020 © Neuer Berliner Kunstverein / Jens Ziehe
Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, The Right to Have Rights, HD video (video still), 2019 © n.b.k. / Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz
Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz have had a decisive influence on contemporary art discourse with their performance-based films and installations. They strategically explore the ambivalences of visibility by precisely choreographing camera movements, viewers, and objects in space. Their artistic practice manifests itself in films, performances, songs, objects, and texts. They collaborate with dancers, choreographers, and visual artists with whom they share a long history of dealing with conditions of performance and violent hierarchies of bodies, but also of companionship, glamour, and resistance.
With the solo exhibition The Right to Have Rights, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein presents a new work by Boudry and Lorenz. In their room-filling video installation, the artists turn their attention for the first time to international law with an excerpt from the 1951 Refugee Convention. This agreement, made between 147 states, guarantees extensive rights for refugees and is still valid today. The performer MPA recites the text on the abandoned runway of the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin. While the spoken word and thus the written decree of this legally binding treaty gradually gives way to a musical composition (sound design: Rashad Becker), the work of Boudry and Lorenz negotiates the fluid status of people and their political rights based on inclusion and exclusion.
Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz live in Berlin and have worked together since 2007. In 2019, they represented Switzerland at the 58th Venice Biennale. Solo exhibitions (selection): Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (2019); Centre culturel suisse, Paris (2018); Participant Inc., New York (2017); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2017); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2016); Kunsthalle Zürich (2015); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2015); Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2013). Group exhibitions (selection): Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2018); Biennale of Moving Images, Geneva (2016); Akademie der Künste Berlin (2015); CAFA Art Museum, Beijing (2014); Venice Biennale (2011). Since 2019 their video To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation (2013) has been part of the collection of the n.b.k. Video-Forum.
With the solo exhibition The Right to Have Rights, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein presents a new work by Boudry and Lorenz. In their room-filling video installation, the artists turn their attention for the first time to international law with an excerpt from the 1951 Refugee Convention. This agreement, made between 147 states, guarantees extensive rights for refugees and is still valid today. The performer MPA recites the text on the abandoned runway of the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin. While the spoken word and thus the written decree of this legally binding treaty gradually gives way to a musical composition (sound design: Rashad Becker), the work of Boudry and Lorenz negotiates the fluid status of people and their political rights based on inclusion and exclusion.
Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz live in Berlin and have worked together since 2007. In 2019, they represented Switzerland at the 58th Venice Biennale. Solo exhibitions (selection): Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (2019); Centre culturel suisse, Paris (2018); Participant Inc., New York (2017); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2017); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2016); Kunsthalle Zürich (2015); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2015); Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2013). Group exhibitions (selection): Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2018); Biennale of Moving Images, Geneva (2016); Akademie der Künste Berlin (2015); CAFA Art Museum, Beijing (2014); Venice Biennale (2011). Since 2019 their video To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation (2013) has been part of the collection of the n.b.k. Video-Forum.