In Conversation: Rachel Cusk and Julienne Lorz

On the day of the talk, Restaurant Beba will be serving a variation on Louise Bourgeois’s recipe for Oxtail Stew, published in FOOD SEX ART: The Starving Artists’ Cookbook (1991).

Together with the exhibition catalogue, a curated selection of publications on Louise Bourgeois is available in the Walther König Bookshop at the Gropius Bau.

Rachel Cusk is the author of ten novels, three non-fiction works, a play, and numerous shorter essays and memoirs. Her first novel, Saving Agnes, was published in 1993. Her most recent novel, Second Place, was published in 2021. Cusk studied English at Oxford and published her first novel when she was 26 years old. The themes of femininity and social satire remained central to her work over the next decade. In responding to the formal problems of the novel representing female experience she began to work additionally in non-fiction. Her autobiographical accounts of motherhood and divorce (A Life’s Work and Aftermath) were groundbreaking and controversial. Most recently she attempted to evolve a new form, one that could represent personal experience while avoiding the politics of subjectivity and literalism and remaining free from narrative convention. That project became a trilogy (Outline, Transit and Kudos). Outline was one of The New York Times’ top 5 novels of 2015.

Julienne Lorz is curator of the exhibition Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child (2022) at the Gropius Bau and author in the accompanying exhibition catalogue. Her previous exhibition Louise Bourgeois. Structures of Existence: The Cells (2015) at Haus der Kunst toured extensively. Lorz started out as a contemporary dancer and choreographer in the UK in the early 1990s. From 2008 to 2017, Lorz curated various international projects, monographic and thematic exhibitions at the Haus der Kunst in Munich with artists such as Allora & Calzadilla (2008), Haegue Yang (2012), Joëlle Tuerlinckx (2013) and Laure Prouvost (2015). In 2018, she was appointed chief curator at the Gropius Bau in Berlin, where, together with Natasha Ginwala, she co-curated And Berlin Will Always Need You. Art, Craft and Concept Made in Berlin (2019) and curated Thea Djordjadze’s exhibition all building as making (2021-2022). Since October 2021, Julienne Lorz is professor of Expanded Museum Studies at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. In 2022 she is also co-curator of the Joan Jonas exhibition at Haus der Kunst.