Dora García

Dora García is a contemporary Spanish artist. García draws on interactivity and performance in her work, using the exhibition space as a platform to investigate the relationship between artwork, audience, and place. García transforms spaces into a sensory experiences by altering perception and creating situations of interaction, often using intermediaries (professional actors, amateurs, or people she meets by chance) to enhance critical thinking. By engaging with the binary of reality vs. fiction, visitors become implicated as protagonists either in the construction of a collective fiction or questioning of empirical constructions–sometimes knowingly, and sometimes not. Since 1999 García has created several artworks on the web.
Dora García studied in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. As a young artist she moved to Brussels where she lived for 16 years.
She participated with the real time theatre in public space “The Beggar’s Opera” in Münster Sculpture Projects 2007, where the character Charles Filch made his first appearance in her work. She has always been interested in anti-heroic and marginal personas as a prototype to study the social status of the artist, and in narratives of resistance and counterculture. In this regard, Dora García has developed works on the DDR political police, the Stasi (“Rooms, Conversations”, film, 24 ‘, 2006), on the charismatic figure of US 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, 2008) or on the origins, rhizomatic associations and consequences of antipsychiatry (“Mad Marginal” book series since 2010, “The Deviant Majority”, film, 34’, 2010).
In the last years, 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”, film, 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”, 2017).
She represented Spain at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, and presented her work in the next Biennale 2013 in the collateral events, and in the international exhibition of the Biennale 2015, curated by Okwui Ewenzor.