Renaissance Reflux II
during the exhibition Les Gardiennes
Kunstmuseum Bochum
Curated by Lisa Klosterkötter & Alicia Reymond

Photos © Lisa Klosterkötter

For the second iteration of Renaissance Reflux, the museum garden is turned into a terrarium. Paulina Nolte and Rosanna Graf adjust the spectrum between reality and hallucination, while celebrating the act of weirding. The gaping audience, on the other side of the window, provoke a series of weird actions. In the form of a singspiel, the figures liberate themselves from the social gaze and the body hair grows!

Performed on the 11th of February 2023 at Kunstmuseum Bochum.

In Renaissance Reflux two women find themselves undergoing states of radical transformation in which the act of “Weirding” becomes a survival strategy. They are popping up in different realities as different characters with contrasting sensibilities and confronted with strange outcomes, while performing an alchemical experiment. Distilling ideas of human nature and the perils of Neoliberalism, Renaissance Reflux is a playful and observant take on an anti-human, bureaucratic and digitized future, whilst yearning towards a more interconnected, social and earthly in-between state; where roots are tugged on and the mycelium is tickled awake.

Divided into four acts (I: The Office, II: The Tower, III: Into the Garden and IV: Lady Mystic) the performance uses a pseudo film-script oscillating between self-written, surrealist storytelling, scientific jargon and found text fragments. A supposed Re-Renaissance is taking place, in which the cult of the individual — taken to its extreme — threatens to falter. Beliefs and elements of society that were suppressed during the first Renaissance are now re-emerging in new guises. Ghosts of the old such as rationality, linearity and individualism are challenged by an openness to irrationality, queerness, spirituality, cyclical concepts, and a new sense of collectivity.

Renaissance Reflux is a performative collaboration between the artists Rosanna Graf and Paulina Nolte.

 25th of November at Centrum, Berlin
Curated by Rachel Monosov & Jorgina Stamogianni
(photos: Goscha Steinhauer and Rosanna Graf)

3rd of December as part of the exhibition Les Gardiennes, Kunstmuseum Bochum
Curated by Lisa Klosterkötter & Alicia Reymond

(photos: Daniel Sadrowski, Kunstmuseum Bochum)