Art Agenda // Moving Backwards at JOAN Los Angeles
As I sit to organize my thoughts on Pauline Boudry and Renata Lorenz’s installation Moving Backwards, currently on show in Los Angeles project space JOAN, breaking news alerts slide anxiously across my screen like ephemeral disaster poetry:
Russia closes China land border to prevent spread of coronavirus.
Press Send for Brexit: E.U. Seals UK Withdrawal by Email.
Republicans Block Impeachment Witnesses, Clearing Path for Trump Acquittal.
Netanyahu Plans to Extend Israeli Sovereignty Over Jordan Valley and Settlements.
Boudry and Lorenz’s response to this moment of what they call “reactionary backlashes” is to find power and possibility in backward movement, as a strategy of tactical response. Through a multimedia work featuring, as its centerpiece, a video of a series of dances that play with perceptions of locomotion, the artist duo ask what power could be assumed by disassociating the notion of forward movement from advancement and backward movement with defeat. Put another way, what violence is imposed by a conceptualization of time that is grounded in a colonial understanding of progress as an act of continuous conquest?
