Dora García
Dora García is an artist, teacher and researcher who lives and works in Oslo. She has developed works on the GDR political police (the film Rooms, Conversations, 24', 2006, first presented at GfZK, Leipzig, Germany), on the comedian Lenny Bruce (Just because everything is different... Lenny Bruce in Sydney, one-time performance, Sydney Biennale, 2008) or on the rhizomatic associations of antipsychiatry (Mad Marginal book series since 2010, and The Deviant Majority, film, 34', 2010, part of her performance project The Inadequate, first presented at the Spanish Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale). She has used classical TV formats to research Germany's most recent history (Die Klau Mich Show, Documenta13, 2012), frequented Finnegans Wake reading groups (The Joycean Society, 53', 2013), created meeting points for voice hearers (The Hearing Voices Café, since 2014) and researched the crossover between performance and psychoanalysis (The Sinthome Score, 2013, and Segunda Vez, 2018). In 2018-24 she developed the film project Amor Rojo, on Marxist feminist Alexandra Kollontai and the impact of her legacy on Third-World, intersectional transfeminisms.
She has produced, as editor and author, a large number of publications, among the most recent are: Inserts in Real Time (M HKA, Antwerp BE, 2023), If I Could Wish for Something (Netwerk BE & Fotogalleriet NO, 2021), Love with Obstacles (K.Verlag DE, 2020), On Reconciliation (K.Verlag DE, 2018), and Segunda Vez (Torpedo Books NO, 2018). (2024)
Publications[edit]
- Inserts in Real Time. Dora García. Performance Work, 2000-2023, eds. Dora García and Joanna Zielińska, Berlin: K.Verlag, with Antwerp: M HKA, 2023, 328 pp. The first monograph dedicated to the performance work of Dora García; developed alongside García’s exhibition She Has Many Names at M HKA, Antwerp, 2023. With contributions by Dora García, Bojana Cvejić, Sven Lütticken, and Joanna Zielińska. Artist's website. Publisher. Book launch.
- If I Could Wish for Something. A Book of Visual and Text Essays (editor), Oslo: Fotogalleriet, and Aalst: Netwerk Aalst, 2021, 222 pp, PDF. Tells, from various viewpoints, the fascinating, intense, and rather melancholic love story between socialism and feminism. With texts by Antonio Cataldo, Saddie Choua, Paloma Contreras Lomas, Dora García, Agnieszka Gratza, Carla Lamoyi, Hilde Methi, Andrea Valdés, Sayak Valencia, and Pieternel Vermoortel. Publisher.
- Love with Obstacles: Amor Rojo (editor), Berlin: K.Verlag, 2020, 284 pp. Brings together García’s collaborative research on the life and legacy of Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952)—a revolutionary, socialist, feminist, activist, and intellectual. Nr. 5 in García’s series Mad Marginal (published since 2010). Appeared on the occasion of the solo exhibition Love with Obstacles at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waldheim, Massachusetts, 2020. With contributions by Alexandra Kollontai, Anna Akhmatova, Ruth Estévez, Paloma Contreras Lomas, Maria Lind, Dora García, Carla Lamoyi, Rina Ortiz, Álvaro Ruiz Rodilla, and Ana Sofía Rodríguez Everaert. Publisher. (English)/(Spanish)
- On Reconciliation / Über Versöhnung (editor), Berlin: K.Verlag, with Freiburg: Gallery for Contemporary Art – E-WERK, and Oslo: Academy of Fine Art Oslo/Oslo National Academy of the Arts, 2018, 256 pp. Uses the letters exchanged between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt from 1925 and 1975 as a departure for a series of essays and conversations aiming to encourage a public debate on a difficult subject: the question of ethics and artistic production. With contributions by Dora García, Simon Asencio, Rebecka Katz Thor, Nikola Mirković, Anna-Sophie Springer, Mark Thomas, Yuliya A. Tsutserova, Etienne Turpin, and Adriano Wilfert Jensen; including facsimile reproductions of selected letters between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Publisher. (English)/(German)
- Dora García. Second Time Around, which is in fact the first, Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2018, 161 pp. Outlines the complex network of intellectual reference points — from literature to more marginal or heterodox frames of reference – her artistic practice draws from as it circulates fiction, performance and what García refers to as the “illusion of the human psyche” produced by everything. Contributors: Peio Aguirre, Dena Beard, David Dorenbaum, Dora García, Francesco Matarrese, Doreen Mende. Exhibition. Publisher. Exh. review: Sean O'Toole (e-flux).
- Dora García. Segunda Vez, que siempre es la primera, Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 161 pp. Publisher. (Spanish)
- Segunda Vez - How Masotta Was Repeated, Oslo: National Academy of the Arts, and Torpedo Press, 2018, 319 pp. An art research project centered on the figure of Oscar Masotta (Buenos Aires, 1930, Barcelona, 1979), an author of groundbreaking texts about the Happening, art, and dematerialization, a pioneer of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the Spanish-speaking world, and a happenista. Publisher.
- Oscar Masotta: Segunda Vez, Cahier No.2, Oslo: Torpedo Press, and Oslo National Academy of the Arts, 2017, 31 pp. With texts by Dora Garcia, Cloe Masotta, Oscar Masotta. Publisher.
- Oscar Masotta: Segunda Vez, Cahier No.1, Oslo: Torpedo Press, and Oslo National Academy of the Arts, 2017, 37 pp. With texts by Dora Garcia, Cloe Masotta, Oscar Masotta. Publisher.
