Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz

Always Night, 2025

Two-channel video installation, 25 min. Performance : Chelsea Manning

The video installation Always Night features anti-war activist Chelsea Manning, who has been a major source of inspiration for both artists for many years. Rather than returning to the subjects and themes usually associated with her - such as the disclosure of evidence relating to US war crimes in Iraq or activism on behalf of young transgender people in the USA - Boudry/Lorenz show her playing a set in the empty room of Berlin's SchwuZ club, Germany's first queer club. The sound of Manning's performance was captured using several recording devices, underlining the importance of each sonic perspective in the collective experience of listening, dancing and partying. In Always Night, sound carries a queer potential, a force for cohesion despite war and repression. In the words of Chelsea Manning

We turn to sound when things become unspeakable. We turn to sound because we crave pleasure and want to rediscover that amber ^optimism1.

With this work, the duo is interested in sound as a vector of social bonding that transcends words or speeches. In Always Night, music is both a tool of resistance in the face of violence and systems of oppression, and a space of joy and hope.

The installation is in two parts. In parallel with the projected performance, a short two-minute filmed interview with Chelsea Manning is broadcast through headphones.

¹ We tend to sound to connect, where things are unspeakable. We tend to sound because we crave pleasure and getting back that amber optimism.

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Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz have been working together in Berlin 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 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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