k_b_l
Brigitta Kuster, Pauline Boudry, Renate Lorenz

Under the name k_b_l, Pauline Boudry, born 1972 in Lausanne, Brigitte Kuster, born 1970 in Berlin, and Renate Lorenz, born 1963 in Berlin, have been working together as a collective since 1997. Together and individually, the artists produce queer and feminist art projects and are editors, including in 1999 of "Reproduction Accounts Falsify! Heterosexuality, Work and Home" and in 2007 of "Sexual Work. A Queer Perspective on Work and Precarious Life." Boudry and Lorenz have worked together as a duo since 2006 and have been included in numerous international solo and group exhibitions. In 2020 they were featured at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and in 2019 at the Swiss Pavilion of the Biennale di Venezia. Their performances premiered at Participant, New York in 2017 and were featured in "Witch Hunt" at the Hammer Museum in 2021. Solo exhibitions include 2022/2023 at Museo Reina Sofia, Spain, 2022 Museum Madrid, 2021 Kunstraum Innsbruck, Frac Bretagne, 2019 Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin, 2018 Centre Culturel Suisse Paris, 2017 Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) Houston, 2015 Kunsthalle Zürich and Kunsthalle Wien, 2013 Badischer Kunstverein and Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux (CAPC), Bordeaux, 2012 South London Gallery, 2011 Centre d'Art Contemporain Geneva.
Pauline Boudry, a graduate of the Geneva Academy of Art, plays in the band Rhythm King and her Friends and held a visiting professorship at the Berlin-Weissensee School of Art in 2005. Renate Lorenz, who studied acting, theater and media at the University of Giessen and media art in Cologne, has held teaching positions for gender theory at various universities. Since 2009, she has held a professorship for art and research at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
Kuster, who studied art in Lucerne, has emerged as a video maker and author and has been involved in various political initiatives such as Anbau neue Mitte, RESPECT and Gesellschaft für Legalisierung. She teaches cultural studies film research with a focus on gender as an assistant professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

As k_b_l, the artists are devoted to a long-term, transdisciplinary research project, which by referring to various historical and current working realities, shows the interlinking of work and sexuality. The project covers art, film, theater, music, and theory and has its own website www.queeringwork.de. The production of subjectivity at the workplace is investigated from a queer-feminist perspective. The artists analyze processes of power and dominance that produce gender and sexual identities. The term “sexual work” is used by k_b_l to address behaviors that train sexuality and gender along existing norms, as well as techniques of reworking social assignments and relations. The starting point of the most recent work by Boudry and Lorenz are historical photographs and films, which they question in terms of the meaning of visibility of sexual and gender positions. In addition, they reflect on the relationship of photography to colonial economies of the waning nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with regard to the production of images of the foreigner, the Other. These works, too, examine the labor necessary for the production of recognized representations of sexuality and gender, and are concerned with the issue of how it is possible to live difference.

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