The fourth cahier of Dora Garcia's Mad Marginal project brings together essays by international authors that develop different threads pertaining to artist Dora García's practice.
In her research, Dora Garcia explores—through the figures of James Joyce and Robert Walser—deviant literature, exploded language, the unconscious, and the notion of exile as inherent to artistic practice. García is currently examining voice-hearing and other extrasensory perceptions. Mad Marginal Charts, an abstract mapping of references central to her idea of marginality as an artistic position, marks her trajectory in this new cycle of works, which has been featured and elaborated in exhibitions in 2014 and 2015.
Contrary to the idea that would have art addressing the greatest possible number of people, Dora García (born in 1965 in Valladolid, lives and works in Barcelona), best known for her performance devices, is interested in what is enacted at the individual scale: in a radically conceptual form, at once accessible and elegant, she elects to transmit oddly coded messages, their ask being to bestir a specific relation with each and every visitor. Dora García is interested in everything that intervenes in the communication between an artist and his/her public: art no longer represents the world, but itself becomes a producer of realities often on the borderline of fiction and make-believe. It urges us to undergo experiences other than ordinary situations, at once simple and hard to grasp.
Dora García has had solo exhibitions at the MACBA in Barcelona, the Reina Sofia in Madrid and the SMAK in Gent. She represented Spain at the Venice Biennale in 2011, and was a part of the Skulptur Projekte Münster 07, the Sydney Biennial in 2009, the Biennale de Lyon in 2009 and Documenta 13 in 2012.
Edited by Chantal Pontbriand.
Contributions by Caroline Andrieux, David Dorenbaum, Dora García, Maria C. Havstam, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Vanessa Ohlraun, Britta Peters, Chantal Pontbriand, Kjetil Røed, Margit Säde, Caroline von Taysen, David Tomas.
