Gerard & Kelly: Ruins

The duo's performative interrogations of architecture excavate political and gender norms

The Paris-based American artists Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly (born 1978 and 1979) have collaborated for nearly two decades on performance, video and installation projects blending the movement of conceptualist dance, the strategies of appropriation and institutional critique and the tenets of queer theory. They are perhaps best known for their site-specific dance videos. By staging choreographic and cinematographic works at locations such as Philip Johnson's Glass House or the Maison Carree temple, the duo rereads architectural icons, subverting their original bourgeois and patriarchal usage and questioning assumptions of gender, sexuality, memory and history. This book documents the duo's first museum survey exhibition at Carre d'art-Musee d'art contemporain de Nimes. The catalog gathers together an extensive array of their video installations, sculptures, site-specific interventions, performances and works on paper.