Carolyn Lazard: Hintertür

Monograph based on Carolyn Lazard’s eponymous video installation drawing from the sensorial legacy of flicker films.
This book is published on the occasion of Lazard’s exhibition at Kunstverein Braunschweig in 2021. Hintertür points to the mutual embodiment of both the filmmaker and the viewer, animating questions of agency and access concerning phenomenological cinema. In addition, Lazard inverts Kunstverein Braunschweig’s spatial logic by implementing architectural interventions that fundamentally change how audiences navigate the building. In historic buildings, physical barriers to access are normally regulated by Braunschweig’s historic preservation codes. Alternatively, artistic interventions are permitted to make minor changes to historic buildings. For this exhibition, Lazard developed Remise ramp (2021), a ramp connecting two rooms, and Remise signs (2021), an alternative sign system directing visitors to the back door of the space.
American artist Carolyn Lieba Francois Lazard (born 1987 in Upland, California) questions the capitalist idealization of health and productivity by establishing “radical possibilities of incapacity” as a practice to rethink conventional understandings of labor. Drawing on these concepts of “crip time,” Lazard’s work explores fugitive occupations of dominant time and institutional space.