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The dancers incorporate a range of movement patterns: extreme slowness, rhythmic changes, stillness, breaks. Some movements in duet seem to run counter to each other in time. Individual dance sequences are occasionally technically altered, played backwards, slowed down, or sped up. The largely absent music foregrounds the moving bodies, making the dance styles—inspired by hip-hop, dancehall, (post-)modern dance, and drag performance—all the more distinguishable. Linking them together are sudden similarities, powerful movements and body memories that create or shift points of connection.

The artists use specific devices in their theatrical staging: particularly striking are the chains attached to the performers’ clothing, a recurring motif in Boudry and Lorenz’s work. (No) Time finds a number of silver chains attached to a sleeve, evoking both jewelry and weaponry. Or a cap embellished with a curtain of chains that obscures the dancer’s face. The chain prosthetics are actively used throughout the dance to enhance the range of limb movement, but also as a visual-acoustic element meant to draw the viewer’s attention. There are also deliberate references to both hip-hop culture and drag performances. Chains remain ambiguous in the context of the dance; in solo and duet performances, they are tied to both aggressive and defensive movements. Additional props, such as platform shoes, pointe shoes, and wigs, also come into play, their loaded symbolism turning them into active agents in their own right.

The black stage itself is fundamental to the scenario, functioning both literally and figuratively as a “black box.” The strategic use of an automatic glass sliding door creates visual separation and focus within the stage space, emphasizing the performers’ entrances and exits as a significant theatrical element. Adding to the effect is the shiny, reflective stage floor, which effectively doubles the performance and gives it a surreal, utopian quality. The yellow blinds in front of the projection move seemingly autonomously, intermittently obscuring the view of the dance performance to create visual voids and narrative interstices.

Historically, dance (or rather the music that accompanies it) has served as a powerful medium for empowering marginalized groups and artistically resisting existing social and power structures, often in subversive ways. Examples include capoeira, hip hop, dancehall, and drag performance. The artists link this cultural-historical dimension to the contemporary phenomenon of backlash—defined as a strong, negative reaction to progressive ideas, actions, or objects. Backlash refers to the normative so-called social majority’s resistance to and strong rejection of progressive marginalized groups that seek social change by challenging structural privilege and power dynamics. The recent video works Moving Backwards (2019) and Les Gayrillères (2022), along with (No) Time, form a trilogy in which backlashes serve as a catalyst for artistic exploration through dance and queer spaces of action and possibility. The latter were developed in collaboration with a team of choreographers and performers.

In the trilogy, the artists explore the phenomenon of liminal spaces—zones of transition between times, between social (dis)orders and conditions and states yet to be realized or achieved. The term liminality was first coined in the late 1960s by cultural anthropologist Victor Turner and has since been discussed in various fields of research, art theory among them. Turner uses it to describe the threshold state in which individuals or groups find themselves after a ritual separation from the dominant social order (e.g., the transition from childhood to adolescence to adulthood).

The concept of liminality is particularly relevant today. Current analyses of shifting political and socio-cultural landscapes can often be interpreted as direct descriptions of the phenomenon of liminality; societal upheavals and changes in individual status are accompanied by disruptions and challenges that can threaten or destabilize personal lives and social orders. It is in this context that unstable in-between spaces emerge outside familiar structures, affecting entire social groups across cultures.

In their practice, Boudry and Lorenz explore and theatrically enact the potential of transformative spaces and bodies in a state of suspension, examining social conditions from a minority perspective. The result is subversive artistic acts that create a threshold state between familiar sociocultural structures and a new, initially unknown environment and persona, or anticipate possible futures. This liminal state is not static but dynamic and fluctuating. It involves accepting and embracing the process, or understanding art as an experience of the liminal.

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz are based in Berlin, where they have been working together since 2007. Their installations are characterized by a choreographic exploration of the tension between visibility and opacity. Their films capture performances in front of the camera and are often inspired by a song, an image, a film, or film scores from the recent past. Staging, layering, and reinventing characters and storylines over time becomes a means of challenging normative historical narratives and conventions of spectatorship. Performers include choreographers, artists, and musicians with whom the artists have engaged in discussions about the conditions of performance, the often violent history of (in)visibility, the pathologization of bodies, society, glamour, and resistance. The intentional defiance of conventional and traditional forms of representation serves to question these very forms.

Solo exhibitions and projects by the artists include those at Kunstnernes hus in Oslo (2023), Tensta konsthall in Stockholm (2023), Palacio de Cristal / Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (2022), CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid (2022), Neue Berliner Kunstverein (2022), Kunstraum Innsbruck (2021), Frac Bretagne in Rennes (2021), the Swiss Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), Julia Stoschek Collection in Berlin (2019), Centre culturel suisse in Paris (2018), Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (2017), Kunsthalle Zürich (2015), and Kunsthalle Wien (2015). Selected group exhibitions include the 35th São Paulo Biennial (2023), Centre Pompidou in Paris (2023), Kunstmuseum Magdeburg (2023), Kunstverein Braunschweig (2023), Whitechapel Gallery in London (2022), National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne (2022), Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (2022), Sofia Art Projects in Sofia (2021), Mudam – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg (2021), and BAK, basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht (2021).

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