Nottingham Contemporary

New York-based artist Dora Budor’s (b. 1984, Zagreb) first institutional exhibition in the UK features a series of newly commissioned works concerned with techniques of the built environment and the various forms of psychosocial control induced by it. Inherent to this is the development of ‘pastoral power’ as an individualising and totalising force that continues to shape the social body. In the UK, this infers the historical development of enclosures of common agricultural land; to the development of 19th-century utilitarian architecture and a welfare state designed to improve the moral character of the social body; to present-day strategies of urban renewal and beautification, privatisation of public land, and the proliferation of hostile architecture. Proceeding from the formal language of sculpture, states of intoxication, disobedience and transience are met with states of safety, moralisation, well-being and protection, and re-encoded into works that both index and subvert the forms in which they are found.

The exhibition was made between New York and Nottingham, where Budor was in residence in 2023.