Sergi Rusca

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PAULINE BOUDRY/RENATE LORENZ
The night is red. The streets are deserted.

31 October – 5 December 2026


Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS
Amsterdam
The Netherlands

For their new solo exhibition at the gallery, Boudry/Lorenz present All The Things She Said (2025), a film installation that 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.

In an interview presented in proximity to the projection, Manning explains the role that music has played in her life: “music is how I’ve always survived”. Most remarkably, she recounts how she would be able to cope with her confinement in prison by tuning into DJ sets via a pocket radio. For queer people, music, and house and techno music in particular, has always been a means of transcending hardship and building community. The dance floor might be empty, but perhaps only for a while: the potential for bodies to join lingers, the beckoning call of music waits to be answered.

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.


©2022—’24

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