Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz The night is red. The streets are deserted. 31.10.––05.12.2026
Opening October 31, 5 to 7pm
For their new solo exhibition at the gallery, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz present All The Things She Said (2025), which continues their investigation into performance, spectatorship, visibility, and resistance. In this work, they do so by proxy of Chelsea Manning, anti-war activist and whistleblower who became known after disclosing hundreds of thousands of classified and sensitive documents on US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks, resulting in her imprisonment between 2010 and 2017.
In the film installation, we see Manning playing a DJ set at Berlin’s SchwuZ, the oldest club for queer and transgender people in Germany, recently forced to closed down due to economic pressure. The venue is empty, Manning is only playing for herself. House remixes of queer club classics fill the dance floor. One of the most visible faces of anti-war activism and transgender rights, Manning is not delivering a speech in front of a crowd––which would be the most intuitive scenario we would imagine her in. Instead, she is tapping into the joy and liberation of music, conjuring its healing power against the widespread of reactionary politics across the world.
Next to All The Things She Said, Boudry/Lorenz present a new series of chain sculptures. A recurrent material in their practice, chains are a polysemic object connected to BDSM practices, imprisonment, and jewellery. Their versatility in meaning, together with their duality as both an object of constraint and expression, make them a leitmotiv across their sculptures, videos, installations, and performances.
