ROOMS, CONVERSATIONS
Solo Exhibition by DORA GARCÍA
Leipzig, 20-Apr-07 to 01-Jul-07
Opening on 19-Apr-07, 7pm
Curated by Julia Schaefer
Dora García uses the exhibition space as a platform to investigate the relationship between the visitor, the artwork, and place. To this end, the artist often draws on interactivity and performance. Through minimal changes, not encroaching on the space, the room is converted into a sensory experience, with each visitor leaving it with his or her perceptions altered, or at the very least perhaps with a degree of skepticism. By engaging with Dora Garcías work, we develop the sense that even the smallest signs are possible signifiers. The artist engages herself with the question of what is real and what is fiction, and visitors become protagonists: sometimes knowingly, sometimes not.
While researching the city of Leipzig during her Blinky Palermo grant from the East German Sparkasse Foundation and the Leipzig Sparkasse, Dora García came across the Museum in the Runden Ecke (Round Corner), the original office of the Stasi (GDR secret police), and learned of The Peaceful Revolution in Leipzig in 1989. Her film Rooms, Conversations, exhibited in the GfZK, grapples with the history of the Stasi and engages with SITUATIONS of DENUNCIATION and surveillance. Its not a REENACTMENT; the plot plays out in an undetermined time and space. Rather, Garcia focuses on abstract notions such as fear, control, authority, dependency, absurdity and power, issues she also examined in previous works such as Fahrenheit 451 (1969) (2003) or Instant Narrative (2007), which will be also exhibited in the Leipzig show. Alongside her own videos, objects and installations, Garcia has edited a selection of found footage, historical surveillance videos and photographs made by IM (unofficial collaborators with the Stasi). The material here presented out of its historical context reveals itself surprisingly, as a peculiar form of narrative: conceptually highly interesting examinations of human behaviour and gestures that at times call to mind the Theatre of the Absurd.
Through the eyes of Spanish artist Dora Garcia, Rooms, Conversations opens a new view onto a highly important and topical political and social issue. Garcias work puts visitors into the unclear position of mentally or physically not always knowing whether they are the actor or the spectator whether or not they are playing a role.
Curriculum Vitae
Dora García (Valladolid, 1965) studied Fine Arts at the University of Salamanca, Spain, and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, Holland. She lives and works in Brussels. Since 1999 she has created several works on the web (doragarcia.net). She has exhibited at the Manifesta 1998, Luxembourg, and the Istanbul Biennial 2003, at the SMBA in Amsterdam (1997), the MACBA in Barcelona (2003), and the FRAC Lorraine in Metz (2004). In 2007 she will participate in Munster Sculpture Projects.
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