Publications 2022

Overlooked by the dominant historiography of art until relatively recently, the work of Lorenza Böttner—an artist who painted with her mouth and feet, and who used photography, drawing, dance, installation, and performance as means of aesthetic expression—emerges today as an indispensable contribution to the history of  contemporary painting and performance, as well as to the criticism of bodily and gender normalization in  the late twentieth century. Exercises of resistance to a medical and exoticizing gaze that reduces the function-ally diverse or trans and nonbinary body to the status of specimen and object, Lorenza’s works are characterized not only by the use of self-fiction, the dissident imi- tation of visual styles from the history of art, and bodily  experimentation, but also by criticism of the disciplinary divide between genres and genders, between painting,  dance, performance, and photography, between masculine and feminine, between homosexuality and heterosexuality, between the cis body and the trans body, between object and subject, between active and passive, and between valid and invalid. In what frame of representation can a body make itself visible as human? Who has the right to represent? Who is the represented? Can an image grant or deny a body political agency? How can a body construct an image in order to become a political subject? Is there any aesthetic difference between an image made with the hand and another made with the foot, or does this difference reflect a position of power? These are some of the questions posed by Lorenza Böttner’s visual and performative work.
– Paul B. Preciado

If something is to change regarding the structures of our institutions—and there are many reasons for this—we must also and especially begin with their success stories, and explore their fractures, contradictions, and what they conceal. The project 50 Years after 50 Years of the Bauhaus, whose title was chosen with a deliberate stutter, is an attempt at such a counter-reading. (Iris Dressler, Hans D. Christ, Preface)