Rennes (35000)

Pratical Informations

40mcube

Exposition

29.09.18 → 01.12.18
Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, I Want

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  1. and 2. Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, I Want, still, installation with double HD projection, 16 min, 2015, Performance: Sharon Hayes. Collection Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (UK). Courtesy Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam and Marcelle Alix, Paris.

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz have been working together for more than ten years, making films, and producing installations and sculptures. They describe their research as “queer archaeology”, a way of identifying in history and bringing back to life figures and bodies which have entitled themselves to offer self-descriptions.

40mcube presents the video installation I Want (2015). The film opens with a protagonist wearing tinted glasses. She speaks: “You should feel as comfortable as possible because these art shows can be deadly”. She uses the first person singular, but we swiftly realize that her identity is a multiple one, and that her “I” is, at the very least, that of the New York punk poet Kathy Acker and the whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. Before shifting to her identity as a woman, this latter was a US army soldier who was sent to Iraq, best known for having downloaded and distributed a certain number of secret military reports, which led to his imprisonment. In the words spoken by the protagonist to the camera, there is thus a mixture of snippets of texts and words uttered by K. Acker and C. Manning, which gravitate around several subjects: anti-militarism, sex, identity and subversion. Through the stances and roles she incarnates, what is involved is both transforming society and waging a personal revolution.

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  • This exhibition is part of À cris ouverts, 6th edition of the Ateliers de Rennes – Contemporary art biennale.