Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz "N.O. Body"
Swiss Institute Contemporary Art
This event has ended.
Berlin-based Swiss artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz present a work of intriguing beauty as their US debut. N.O. Body consists of two parts: 47 photographs refer to the comprehensive archive of the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. A video projection reenacts the photograph of the “bearded lady” Annie Jones (1865- 1902). This photograph crosses through two different contexts. It has traveled from the Barnum Circus freak show, where Jones was presented as a “wonder”(for a fee), to the medical theater, where sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld showed her in the book “Geschlechtskunde, Bilderteil” as a potential “patient”. What happens when an “object of knowledge” assumes the position of “producer of knowledge”, and starts to laugh? The result opens up the history of knowledge production once again. The image of an empty auditorium assigns a position to the potential audience: N.O.bodies.
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Schedule
from February 18, 2009 to April 04, 2009