Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz

Always Night, 2025

Video installation with two screens, 25 min, 2025
Performance: Chelsea Manning

As part of the 2nd edition of the Sound Biennial, the Ferme-Asile Barn is hosting the ALWAYS NIGHT exhibition by artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz.

For the film installation All The Things She Said, the artists invited anti-war activist Chelsea Manning to perform. A long-standing source of inspiration for the artists, Manning became world-famous after revealing, via WikiLeaks, documents on war atrocities committed by the United States in Iraq. Convicted following these revelations, she spent seven years in prison before Barack Obama commuted her sentence in 2017.

The film installation features Manning playing a DJ set in an empty Berlin club, SchwuZ. The sound is recorded with several recording devices, underlining the importance of each sonic perspective in the collective experience of playing music, listening, dancing and celebrating. The vast space of SchwuZ resonates, allowing its history - that of Germany's oldest queer and trans club - to be inscribed in the sonic texture. In All The Things She Said, sound is the bearer of queer potential: a force for cohesion in the face of war and repression.

Director of photography: Bernadette Paassen. Camera assistance: Svea Immel. Sound: Johanna Wiener. Machinery: Camilo Sottolichio. Make-up: Nuria de Lario. Production: Wibke Tiarks. Sound design: Rashad Becker. Calibration: Waveline.

This project is co-produced by Ferme-Asile and supported by the Biennale Son and Pro Helvetia.

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Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz

Based in Berlin, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz have been working together since 2007.

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They create installations that choreograph the tension between visibility and opacity.
Their films capture on-camera performances, often based on a song, image, film or score from the near past.
They subvert normative historical narratives and conventions of the gaze, staging, superimposing and reinventing figures and actions across time.

Their performers are choreographers, artists or musicians with whom they maintain a long-term dialogue on the conditions of performance, the violent history of visibility, the pathologization of bodies, but also on complicity, glamour and resistance.

Their sculptures and objects often evoke the potential of performance, using materials that refer to props, stages, costumes, microphones, wigs or dance floors.

They have recently presented their work at MUAC Mexico, the 35th São Paulo Art Biennial, the Crystal Palace / Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, the Mediacity Biennial in Seoul, the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, the New Museum in New York, the Julia Stoschek Collection in Berlin, and the 58th Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

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