Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, N.O.Body, artists" talk, re.act.feminism - performance art of the 1960s and 70s today, Conference and Live Performances, Akademie der Künste, Berlin
Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz
N.O.Body

The collaborative works of Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz (who collaborate since 2007) often revisit materials from the past. They make references to and excavate unrepresented or illegible moments of queer/feminist subversion in history. The majority of their works incorporate performances. Their regular collaboration with performers (such as Werner Hirsch aka Antonia Baehr (see also BAE 1), Vaginal Davis, Yvonne Rainer (see also RAI 1) and Wu Ingrid Tsang)) and their technique of shooting long sequences of performances without interruptions or cuts gives their performances a certain autonomy. And yet the films do not function as re-enactments or as performance documentation. Rather, they stage, edit, remix and repeat actions and contagious gestures which can draw relations between different times, thus revealing possibilities for a queer futurity.

artists' website: https://www.boudry-lorenz.de/

The artists' talk followed a screening of the film N.O.Body, which reenacts a photograph of the 'bearded Lady' Annie Jones (1865–1902). It shows the performer Werner Hirsch dealing with, and restaging her photograph and her social position. The photograph crosses through two different contexts: It travelled from the freak show in the Barnum Circus, where she was presented as a 'wonder' (for a fee), to the medical theater, where she was shown in the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s book Geschlechtskunde, Bilderteil as a potential 'patient.' But what happens in the production of normality and deviance, if the 'object of knowledge' assumes the position of the producer of knowledge, starts laughing and opens up the history of knowledge production once again? The image of an empty auditorium assigns a position to the potential audience: N.O.Body.
Format
Audio Documentation

Document media
Artists' Talk

Issue date
2009

To be seen in
re.act.feminism - performance art of the 1960s and 70s today, Conference and Live Performances, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 24.1.2009 / 3:15 pm

Relations
Antonia Baehr
Yvonne Rainer
Boudry / Lorenz