BERNADETTE PAASSEN
The Berlin-based duo Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz will represent Switzerland at the 2019 Venice Biennale, which runs from May to November next year.
Boudry/Lorenz’s installations typically combine queer histories with an interest in aspects of filmmaking that often go unseen, among them crews, cameras, and sound technology. For their installation Toxic (2012), which was given prime placement last year at the New Museum’s exhibition “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” the artists had a punk talk directly to the camera about how medicine alters trans bodies, then had a drag queen reenact a Jean Genet monologue about hijacking a film set. Other recent works have pondered the role that silence plays in both art and politics and the connection between image-making and surveillance.
Charlotte Laubard, the cofounder of the Société Suisse des Nouveaux Commanditaires, has been tapped to curate the Boudry/Lorenz Swiss Pavilion. In a statement, Laubard said the artists “question the norms that govern our representations and our life in society. What lends their work such force is that it moves beyond mere criticism or deconstruction. Their installations, films and performances are conceived as dispositifs capable of inventing other ways of being in the world, ones no longer split by categories of identity and binarisms.”
Past artists to represent Switzerland at the Venice Biennale include Carol Bove and Hubbard/Birchler (2017), Pamela Rosenkranz (2015), Valentin Carron (2013), and Thomas Hirschhorn (2011).