DORA GARCÍA is an artist, teacher and researcher who draws on interactivity and performance in her work, using the exhibition as a platform to investigate the relationship between artwork, audience, and place.

García transforms spaces into sensory experiences by altering perceptions and creating situations of interaction, often using intermediaries (professional actors, amateurs, or people she meets by chance) to enhance a critical look at things. By engaging with the binary of reality vs. fiction and dwelling in questions of time—real, historical, cyclical, fictional—visitors become implicated (knowingly or not) as protagonists, either in the construction of a collective fiction, or in the deconstruction of conventions.

In this context, she has also always been interested in anti-heroic and marginal personae as a prototype to study the social status of the artist, and in narratives of resistance and counter-culture.

In this regard, García has developed works on the GDR political police, the Stasi (the lm Rooms, Conversations from 2006), on the charismatic gure of U.S. stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce (Just because everything is different it does not mean that anything has changed, Lenny Bruce in Sydney, one-time performance, Sydney Biennale in 2008), and on the origins, rhizomatic associations, and consequences of anti-psychiatry (Mad Marginal book series since 2010, which this book is also a part of, and the film The Deviant Majority, 2010).

In the last few years, she has used classical TV formats to research Germany’s more recent history (Die Klau Mich Show, dOCUMENTA 13 in 2012), frequented Finnegans Wake reading groups (The Joycean Society, lm, 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, 2017).

As an artist, Dora García has participated in numerous international art exhibitions, including Münster Sculpture Projects (2007), Venice Biennial (2011, 2013, 2015), Sydney Biennial (2008) São Paulo Biennial (2010), dOCUMENTA 13 (2012) Gwangju Biennial (2016). In 2019, she participated in osloBiennalen, Art Encounters Timisoara (Romania), and
AICHI Triennale, Japan. She lives in Oslo and Barcelona.

Portret by Bruno Dubner
Photo: Dora García, Love with Obstacles, film, 60′, 2020