Dora Budor

Trained as an architect, the Croatian-born artist Dora Budor regards buildings and institutions as tectonic, infrastructural and gendered systems. Against the aesthetic pursuit of making buildings, she commits to a politics of selectively taking them apart. In Continent (2022) at Kunsthaus Bregenz (KUB), Budor introduced a crisis to Peter Zumthor’s building, probing its physical intactness through a series of interventions that foregrounded concealed operations, forced external structures inwards and made the invisible resonant.

One metre from KUB’s northeastern facade, a manhole leads to an underground collector duct that encircles the foundations of the entire building. Its so-called diaphragm walls extend vertically into the soil, mirroring the height of the above-ground structure. Their function is to prevent the collapse of surrounding buildings and control the seepage of groundwater from the nearby Pfänder mountain and Lake Constance.

On the first of KUB’s three floors, Budor confined the space upon itself. Latex casts of the underground diaphragm walls stood against the ones of the gallery, closing the entrances. The tripartite work Kollektorgang (I – XIV), (XV – XXIV), (XXV – XXIX), all 2021, measured 29 metres in total – mirroring the width and length of the excavation pit that hosts the foundations.

The materials from which the works on display were produced originate from the site of exhibition (Bregenz) or production (Berlin): shredded office paperwork forming the structural mass of Kollektorgang; coffee waste from the KUB Café Bar that ossified into Pucks (bagarreurs) (2021); or a rental bicycle in Something To Remind Me (2021). In the space, they subverted and decentred the usual hierarchy of seeing, furnishing a different mode of attention and time.

Dora Budor (b. 1984, Zagreb, Croatia) is an artist and writer who lives and works in New York. In 2022, Budor participated in the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, and had solo exhibitions at Kunsthaus Bregenz and the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAMeC) in Bergamo. Recent solo exhibitions include Autoreduction at Progetto, Lecce (2021); I am Gong at Kunsthalle Basel (2019); Benedick, or Else at 80WSE, New York (2018); Ephemerol at Ramiken Crucible, New York (2016); and Spring at Swiss Institute, New York (2015). Budor was a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artist Prize in 2014 and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2018. In 2019, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts.