Window Projections | Every day from sunset to 02:00 AM.
"To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desparation"

n.b.k. Video-Forum | Window Projections

Mon, 01/22/2024 -
Sun, 01/28/2024
Goethe-Institut Montreal

The Goethe-Institut Montreal, in cooperation with the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), presents a screening programme of 20 video works from n.b.k Video-Forum’s extensive video art collection, curated by Anna Lena Seiser (Head of Collection n.b.k. Video-Forum).

The individual films will be shown for a week at a time sunset to 2:00 a.m. on the display windows of the Goethe-Institut at 1626 Boul. St-Laurent, Montréal, Québec, H2X 2T1, Canada and can be viewed on an indoor screen during the Goethe-Institut's opening hours:

To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz
2013
00:13:56
Collection Video-Forum, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) 

In the video work To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation (2013), six performers play the eponymous score from 1970 by the US avant-garde composer and sound artist Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016). Oliveros developed the piece after reading the radically feminist SCUM Manifesto (1967) by Valerie Solanas, who later became famous as the woman who shot Andy Warhol. The composition challenges the performers, Rachel Aggs, Peaches, Catriona Shaw, Verity Susman, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, and William Wheeler, to choose five pitches each and to play very long tones, either modulated or unmodulated. In the middle section of the piece the performers are invited to imitate each other’s pitches and modulations, whereas they interact not only with each other and their instruments, but also with the iconic GDR architecture of the Funkhaus Berlin from 1951.

The piece To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation aims to avoid the hierarchies between musicians. Its instructions are designed to create a “continuous circulation of power” (Oliveros) between listening and sounding. The cues in the piece are given collectively through light: a red section is followed by a yellow section and then a blue section, and two further cues are given by strobe light.


Pauline Boudry (*1972 in Lausanne / Switzerland) and Renate Lorenz (1963 in Berlin) live in Berlin and have worked together since 2007. Their artistic practice manifests itself in films, performances, songs, objects, and texts. They collaborate with dancers, choreographers, and visual artists with whom they share a long history of dealing with conditions of performance and violent hierarchies of bodies, but also of companionship, glamour, and resistance.