Boudry / Lorenz
Opening 16.10.2025
Opening 16.10.2025
Istituto Svizzero presents the first solo exhibition by Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz in Italy.
Boudry / Lorenz’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses sculpture, performance, choreography, music, and film installation, often combined into immersive installations that challenge the conventions of both the white cube and the black box. Conceived specifically for the spaces of Villa Maraini, how we always survived includes new commissions alongside existing works, harmonised within a timed installation that unfolds across the villa’s various rooms.
how we always survived explores the doings of sound as a language capable of shaping hope, mourning, and desire in repressive contexts. The title is taken from a sentence by activist Chelsea Manning, one of the exhibition’s protagonists, referring to the role music had for her during her time in prison. The exhibition plays on the boundary between the choice to speak out and the possibility of transforming speech into sound, blurring the lines between aesthetic and political acts.
In the works on display, voice becomes the means to let forgotten pasts resonate, echoing through the villa’s rooms and evoking other places through song. Dance functions as a programmatic tool to guide a collective movement of bodies. The architecture of the villa itself seems to move, participating in the composition with a sequence of gestures that exploit the opposition between light and darkness, sound and silence, pause and motion. The resulting grand choreography appears to pose a question: can moving side by side, in concert, simultaneously connect political disillusion and utopian aspiration?
With the support of Dr. Georg und Josi Guggenheim-Stiftung
Pauline Boudry (*1972, born in Lausanne) and Renate Lorenz (*1963, born in Berlin) have been working together in Berlin since 2007. They produce installations that choreograph the tension between visibility and opacity. Their films capture performances in front of the camera, often starting with a song, a picture, a film or a score from the near past. 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.
Their work has been recently shown at MUAC Mexico City, 35th São Paulo Art Biennial, Crystal Palace/Reina Sofia Museum Madrid, Centre Pompidou Paris, Hammer Museum Los Angeles, Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Whitechapel Gallery London, New Museum New York, Coreana Museum of Art Seoul, National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne, Kunstmuseum Basel, Van Abbe Museum Eindhoven, Julia Stoschek Collection Berlin and the 58th Biennale d’arte di Venezia (Swiss Pavilion).
Recent solo exhibitions include: You Ask Me To Not Give Up Up Up, Abbatiale Bellelay (2025), All The Things She Said, MUAC Mexico City (2025), Fog Is My Drug, Nest, The Hague (2025), A Portrait, Leeum Museum, Seoul (2024), Walk Silently In The Dark Until Your Feet Become Ears, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2023), Portrait of a Movement, Tensta Konstall Stockholm (2023), El cristal es mi piel – Glass Is My Skin, Crystal Palace Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (2022), Portrait of a Movement, CA2M Museum, Madrid (2022), Silent Manifesto, Kunstraum Innsbruck (2021), (No)Time, Frac, Bretagne (2021), Moving Backwards, Swiss Pavilion, 58th Biennale di Venezia, Ongoing Experiments with Strangeness, Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (2019), Telepathic Improvisation, Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris (2018) and CAMH, Houston (2017), Portrait of an Eye, Kunsthalle Zürich (2015), Loving, Repeating, Kunsthalle Wien (2015), Patriarchal Poetry, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2013), Aftershow, CAPC, Bordeaux (2013), Toxic Play in Two Acts, South London Gallery, London (2012), Contagieux! Rapports contre la normalité, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (2011).
Their most recent catalogue, Stages (2022), was published by Spector Books
SAVE THE DATE
Sign up to this event to receive a notification email
Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, All The Things She Said, 2025, Courtesy the artists.