Portrait of a Movement

Can moving arms, legs and hair be inspiring for a movement, a coming uprising for more joyful and equal ways of living together? Engaged with the precarious moment of taking the stage—a moment which allows for one’s visibility while at the same time disclosing one’s fragility—Portrait of a Movement addresses questions of pleasure, power, and radical difference. Portrait of a Movement is the first solo exhibition in Sweden of the internationally-renowned artist duo Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz.

Two large film installations form the core of the exhibition: while engaging with dance movements and artistic collaborations, they explore abstraction’s potential for resistance in the face of reactionary politics.Portrait of a Movement is the first exhibition-based outcome of a decade-long artistic conversation with Boudry / Lorenz and the curator Övül Ö. Durmusoglu. The Stockholm edition of the exhibition is based on the dense, sensual dialogue between (No) Time (2020) and Moving Backwards (2019) reflected on the black, glossy dancefloor that is already traced by the visitors of former exhibitions. The films are accompanied by the special shoes dancers used in Moving Backwards, first shown in the Swiss Pavilion of 58th International Biennial in Venice. The film installation (No) Time (2020) was co-commissioned by Ca2M, FRAC Brétagne and Seoul Mediacity Biennial, and produced for the exhibition at Ca2M in Madrid during the pandemic alongside Stages (Spektor Books, 2022), the first retrospective publication looking at the fifteen years of Boudry / Lorenz collaboration through different objects and situations.

In the installation (No) Time, four performers seem to be rehearsing for a queer time, employing strategies such as extreme slowness, being out of synch, changes of rhythm, stillness, and breaks as they work on escape routes, refusing the deadening beats of labor and the state-sponsored hopeless tacts of being. Both the film set and the installation employ automated elements—a sliding door and a set of blinds mimic the camera’s shutter while offering some refuge in the face of the camera’s gaze. Also activated by the feeling of being pushed backwards by recent backlashes, the second large installation, Moving Backwards, explores resistance practices, combining choreography and urban dance with guerrilla tactics and elements of queer underground culture. Captured by a relentlessly-moving camera, parts of the walks, solos, and group dances are carried out backwards, while others are digitally reversed, giving way to doubt and ambiguity in the installation as a whole. As you follow the performers’ movements, you might no longer understand if they are walking forwards or backwards, if they are moving towards their future or their past.

About the artists:
Portrait of a Movement is the first solo exhibition in Sweden of the internationally-renowned artist duo Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, who have been working together in Berlin since 2007. They upset normative historical narratives and conventions of spectatorship, as figures and actions across time are staged, layered and re-imagined. Their performers are choreographers, artists and musicians, with whom they are having a long-term conversation about the conditions of performance, the violent history of visibility, the pathologization of bodies, but also about companionship, glamour and resistance. Recent solo exhibitions include ”Il cristal es mi piel – Glass Is My Skin” – on view at Crystal Palace Madrid / Museo Reina Sofia until April 2023, ”Portrait of a Movement” CA2M Museum Madrid (2022), ”Silent Manifesto” at Kunstraum Innsbruck (2021), ”(No)Time” at Frac Bretagne (2021), ”Moving Backwards”, Swiss Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019); and “Ongoing Experiments with Strangeness”, Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (2019). Their recent work, ”Les Gayrillères”, featuring choreographers/performers Harry Alexander, Julie Cunningham, Werner Hirsch, Nach, Joy Alpuerto Ritter, Aaliyah Thanisha, is currently on view at Whitechapel Gallery London.

About the curator
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu is a curator, writer and educator working on constructive critiques of civilization, sustainability of intersectional futures and practices of togetherness. She co-leads Art in Discourse at Braunschweig University of Art with Dr. Ana Teixeira Pinto and works as a guest professor for gender politics and aesthetics in curating at University of Fine Arts Münster. In 2022, Övül curated two major monographic exhibitions ‘Portrait of a Movement’ of Boudry/Lorenz in Ca2M, Madrid and ‘Burn and Gloom, Glow and Moon: Thousand Years of Troubled Genders’ of Katrina Daschner in Kunsthalle Wien. In the past, Övül was curator for steirischer herbst festival in Graz; curator/director for YAMA public screen in Istanbul; curatorial advisor for Gülsün Karamustafa’s ‘Chronographia’ at Hamburger Bahnhof, artistic director for the festival Sofia Contemporary 2013 titled as ‘Near, Closer, Together: Exercises for a Common Ground’. She curated programs within 10th, 13th, and 14th Istanbul Biennials; coordinated and organized different programs and events at Maybe Education and Public Programs for dOCUMENTA (13). During the Covid-19 pandemic, she co-initiated the neighbourhood project ‘Die Balkone: Life, Art, Pandemic and Proximity’ with Joanna Warsza in Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin. They co-curated a locally and internationally well received 3rd edition for Autostrada Biennale in 2021 and continue to work together for the 4th edition taking place in the summer of 2023 in Kosovo. She contributes to magazines such as Artforum Online, Spike and Frieze and various exhibition publications.The exhibition was originally commissioned and produced by Ca2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid.