The Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz’s Moving Backwards

The music begins as an orchestral flow, similar to what accompanies opening credits, and you hurry through an entry lined with introductory materials. You make a mental note to come back.

The main section of Gallery 276 is movie-theater dim. As your eyes adjust, you notice a bench along the back wall, and sit. On a large screen about 15 feet away, three people walk backward slowly, right to left, as though stepping through peanut butter. When they are finally across, two sets of sequined curtains close: one onscreen, another in the room. Is it over?

No. Soon the sparkling curtains part, revealing a woman with long straight hair wearing white cowboy boots. Instead of heels and pointy toes, her boots are pointed at both ends. Her hair hangs evenly all around her head, so no face is visible. She holds her arms ambiguously, curved away from her body, and the film has been manipulated to skip and reverse some of the motion. All of this makes it difficult to tell if she’s coming or going, or if this is a woman at all.

Begin to move backward to begin

Next is a solo hip-hop-style dancer, then one with sharp, syncopated moves reminiscent of Michael Jackson. Michael is replaced by more dancers. The music has changed several times. Now it’s loud and pulsing, making the gallery feel like a postmodern club. The curtain closes again. What’s happening?

Wishing you hadn’t skipped the pamphlets at the entrance, you debate whether to backtrack as the film resumes. A performer with boots on her hands holds them skyward as she performs graceful balletic kicks across the screen and exits. Then she returns with friends, some of whom sport long-haired wigs on their shoulders, making the dance floor appear more crowded than it really is. Suddenly, a clapboard, the kind used on movie sets, fills the screen and snaps closed. The end?

Nope. Now the virtual club spills into the gallery. Strobe lights flash overhead and the volume increases, inviting observers to join in. You take it as a cue to move backward yourself, doing what you should have done in the first place, and return to the beginning. Boudry and Lorenz’s film plays on to its full 20-minute length.

The ambiguity of direction

The pamphlets at the entrance contain letters from individuals associated with the project, expressing their motivations and feelings. Boudry and Lorenz created Moving Backward, which has been acquired by the PMA, on commission in 2019 for the Swiss Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. The artists have worked together since 2007, exploring themes of gender, sexuality, and historical narrative. Their letter, the first in the booklet, explains what led them to make Moving Backward.

“When we created this work, we shared our feeling of being pushed backwards,” they wrote. “By now this feeling has intensified to such a degree that it leaves us breathless. Do you sometimes feel as if you too are being forced to move backwards?” The artists were inspired by a story of women in the Kurdish guerilla movement, who escaped through snowy mountains by wearing their shoes backward, thus misleading their pursuers.

Boudry and Lorenz considered the women’s tactic to be a metaphor for progress, resistance, and power, all of which can be good or bad depending on the circumstances and one’s perspective. With nimble editing, gender-indeterminate performers, and rapidly shifting sights, sounds, and boundaries between onscreen and real life, their disorienting meditation on the ambiguity of movement and direction dislodges even the most fixed expectations, forcing viewers to reexamine what they see, hear, and think they know.

Facing the backlash

Moving Backward is the artists’ comment on contemporary events, hurtling us into the future without a thought to broad implications or possible alternatives. “We do not feel represented by our nations [Boudry is Swiss, Lorenz is German] and do not agree with decisions taken in our name,” they wrote.

In a 2019 interview with Hannah McGivern in The Art Newspaper, they said, “Witnessing the political backlashes in terms of gender, sexual rights or the rights of refugees, and the general feeling of being forced to move backwards, we wanted to think of strategies of resistance … the Kurdish women [seem to be] moving backwards, because their shoes leave traces in one direction in the snow. But actually, they are moving forwards ... Conceptually, we like to undermine the idea of flawless progress in the social as well as in the economic realm, and the idea that we always know what the right direction is."

What would the women do?

Their ideas have only become more pertinent in the last six years, and nowhere more than in the United States, which on the eve of its 250th birthday is experiencing a crisis of national identity. Bedrock ideals written in founding documents and engraved on majestic buildings are being eroded by the very people entrusted with their care, who instead of preserving, protecting, and defending the Constitution, disgrace it. They try to make self-dealing synonymous with greatness, and facts are conveniently erased, reversed, or denied to suit the ends of vindictive autocrats.

Which leaves most Americans like the women in the mountains: up to our ankles in snow, shoes on backward, clear-eyed and ready to take action, but uncertain. As we figure out how to foil those coming for America’s values, history, and future, we can only hope to summon the ingenuity and agility of the Kurdish women.