Yvonne Rainer

Despite her years of work and influence as one of the world’s leading choreographers, dancers and filmmakers, Yvonne Rainer (born 1934) has until now not received the retrospective exhibition in Europe that her career deserves. Yvonne Rainer: Space, Body, Language is published for exhibitions at the Kunsthaus Bregenz and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and covers the full spectrum of her work, starting from her foundational New York dance works such as The Mind Is a Muscle (1968), which created a new physical language out of everyday gestures and humdrum objects such as mattresses, barbells and bubblewrap. Moving to her political and feminist films between 1976 and 1996, which took the filmic montage features of her dance (and her incorporation of filmed actions of hands and volleyballs in her performances) to their next level, Space, Body, Language brings us up to the present with Rainer’s return to choreography in 2000 and such recent compositions as Assisted Living: Good Sports 2 (2011) and Spiraling Down (2008). This catalogue presents previously unseen documentation of stage works, notebooks, an astonishing number of dance scores, scripts, movie and exhibition posters and a carefully compiled appendix, as well as essays by Douglas Crimp, Gabriele Brandstetter, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Volker Pantenburg, Catherine Wood and editors Yilmaz Dziewior and Barbara Engelbach.