NEW YORK, NY.- Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz present their first US solo exhibition Everybody talks about the weather… We don’t. It includes a major new moving image work — Telepathic Improvisation — and two new sculptures.

With reference to current violent social conditions, Telepathic Improvisation explores the ways in which others (including other objects) might become part of our striving for alternative political and sexual imaginations. Humans and non-humans, movements, speeches, gestures, music, light, and smoke interpret composer Pauline Oliveros’ 1974 score of the same title. The audience is invited to communicate telepathically with all of the elements on screen, including performers Marwa Arsanios, Werner Hirsch, MPA, and Ginger Brooks Takahashi. While the action of the film appears abstract, it nonetheless includes references to leftist protest, queer S&M club life, acts of surveillance and, finally, fantasies of new relations between human and non-human objects in an interstellar dimension. A published text by Ulrike Meinhof appears – From protest to resistance – written in 1968 two years before Meinhof went underground and joined the RAF. The text marks the rise of leftist movements against the continuation of fascist and imperialist ideas in postwar Germany, Challenging the idea of images as mere depictions of (political) actions, this filmed performance speaks about productive tensions between the fantasy of an action and the action itself.

Artistic-political methods such as opacity — opposing the principles of rendering the Other transparent — determine the duo’s way of creating installations. With their films and sculptures, and the placement of screens and objects in space, they create a dense net of references to the history of art and the often cruel and excluding history of visualization and the gaze. They play with dis/connections between objects and meaning, and with the conventional gendering of material. Does the hair of a huge sculptural hair-work refer to a wig? Does it refer to the history of drag performance? Or is it a glamorous prop? A minimalist object becomes a stage, and the visitor suddenly participates in a narrative that hints towards an alternative future.

This exhibition is presented as part of a year-long series of major presentations by Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz in the US, co-curated by Alhena Katsof in collaboration with the Walker Art Center’s Moving Image Commissions, Minneapolis; EMPAC/Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy; PARTICIPANT INC., New York; and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH). Following the film’s premiere and installation at PARTICIPANT INC., it will stream online via the Walker Art Center’s Moving Image Commissions page. The exhibition will be restaged in a new form at CAMH accompanied by a catalogue with a newly commissioned essay by André Lepecki and contributions by the artists, Victoria Brooks, Dean Daderko, Lia Gangitano, Alhena Katsof, and Mason Leaver-Yap.