#contagiouscollaboration

„Zusammenarbeit“ geht zumeist mit einer Phantasie demokratischer Partizipation einher, obwohl zugleich allen klar ist, dass Zusammenarbeit durch offene oder verdeckte Hierarchien und Machtkämpfe bestimmt ist.

Renate Lorenz works as an artist and a freelance writer particularly in the fields of queer theory and art theory. Her artistic work with Pauline Boudry engages with archives of historical (portrait) photography and film. Here, they focus on the history of sexual and gender discourses and practices, as well as on the meaning and relevance of “visibility” (www.boudry-lorenz.de). Their most recent work includes No Future/No Past (Venice Bienniale 2011, The Power Plant, Toronto) and Toxic (Paris Trienniale 2012). Lorenz’s latest publications are Temporal Drag (Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2011, with Boudry) and Queer Art (Transcript, Bielefeld, 2012). She is a professor of art and research at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Helen Chadwick (1953–1996, UK) is a multimedia artist whose wry, often provocative work explores gender and sexuality, the body, and the self. Diving into the fervent feminist debates about the representation of “women’s bodies” in the 1970s and 80s, Chadwick’s early work often used her own body to challenge discourses about female roles, ideals, and lives. Later on in her career, her strategies shifted to drawing on more abstract vocabularies to discuss the body, including using human and animal body parts and innards. In her 1991–92 work Piss Flowers for instance, Chadwick made a series of casts of flower-shaped forms she created by peeing with her partner into snow. Chadwick was one of the first women to be shortlisted for Britain’s prestigious Turner Prize in 1987. She died suddenly in 1996.

Credit: LUX.org, film still from Helen Chadwick's Domestic Sanitation (1976)

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BBC Woman's Hour
, February 11, 1982, Radio 4


Helen Chadwick talks to Jenni Murray about
 her self portraits, images of women, works on contemporary British life, and her nomination for the Turner prize.