Ellen de Bruijne Projects at Art 42 Basel 2011, June 15-19

Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz

Art 42 Basel/Art Statements: Booth S 07
15-19 June 2011

Ellen de Bruijne Projects presents a new work by Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz: No Future and No Past (both films 16 mm on HD, 15 min.) These two film-installations are based on punk archives from the period between 1976 and 2031, investigating the radical negativity, the self destructiveness and the dystopia of these moments.

The title No Future quotes the punk movement’s demand for ‘no future’ and thus the film takes up the paradoxical premise that we are already in the future, which–according to the temporal ultimatum issued by the punk movement would never come about. The second title No Past ironically demands an abolishment of the past, though the past is considered the basis of the human psyche but also of subjectivity and thus of the existence of human beings in general. No Future and No Past will push this reflection on the relationship between the past and future a little bit further, short-circuiting a linear, or evolutionary conception of time. While the frame of a film image usually picks up important visual elements while omitting less important ones, No Past turns such validations and conventions of film history upside down. Referring to the legendary ‘Ridiculous Theatre’, and the work of Deleuze/Guattari, the film theoretician Marc Siegel qualified the queer politics of the art practice of Boudry/Lorenz as ‘becoming ridiculous’. “A ridiculous critique is not merely unreasonable and hilarious. It also questions rigidities of identity (gender, sexual, racial, and human) and displays a belief in process, style, and fabulation over product, virtuosity, and truth”. (Marc Siegel)

Performers: The choreographer Werner Hirsch and four musicians – Ginger Brooks Takahashi/Men as Darby Crash; Fruity Franky/Lesbians on Ecstasy as Poly Styrene; G. Rizo as Joey Ramone; Olivia Anna Livki as Alice Bag. Director of Photography: Bernadette Paassen.

The work by the Berlin-based Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz (Switzerland, 1972 / Germany, 1963) often revisit practices and materials from the past, referring to forgotten moments of queerness in history. Their work produce a mode of ‘speaking backwards’ or a ‘queer archaeology’ and shows embodiments which are not only able to cross different times, but also draw relations between different times, thus revealing possibilities for a queer futurity.

Boudry/Lorenz previously made the works Normal Work (2007), N.O. body (2008), Salomania (2009) Charming for the Revolution (2009) and Contagious (2010). They had a solo show in Centre d´Art, Geneve Contagieux! Rapports contre la normalité (2010) and are currently in a group show in the Kunsthalle Tallinn with Untold Stories (May 7th- 26th of June) and at Galerie de la Friche Belle de Mai, Marseille the group show K.Acker: The Office (April 23th- 12th June). Their work will also be shown at the Venice Biennial 2011 at the Swiss Off-Site Pavillion Teatro Fondamenta Nuove, with the show Chewing the Scenery curated by Andrea Thal.