Dora García. A letter from Joyce to Ibsen. The Inadequate.

Dora García reflects on the parameters and conventions governing the presentation of art, on the question of time (real and fictional) and on the boundaries between representation and reality. Through her work the artist presents reality as multiple and questionable and explores the relationship between the artist, the work, and the public. She acts like a cinema director who tells stories (or simply selects them), unchains a situation, situates us in a scenario or makes us participants in a game the rules of which are very similar to reality, and for this very fact allow us to question it. Her work, conceptual in nature, consists of text, photographs, and installations restricted to the specific location. She often draws on participation and performance (performances with actors who follow a series of instructions). Through minimal changes, the exhibition space is converted into a different experience for each visitor, who leaves it with his or her perceptions altered, or at least with a degree of skepticism and doubt.

A letter from Joyce to Ibsen. The Inadequate

The springboard for the exhibition is Dora García’s film The Joycean Society (2013). The film reveals a book club dedicated to James Joyce`s Finnegan’s Wake, a society made up of students, admirers and connoisseurs of what is often said to be “the most difficult book in the world”. With the group’s painstakingly decoding of the text, García explores the relationship between the reality of the reader’s experience, perception and the fictions this reality refers to.

As a connective element of the exhibition in Moss, Dora García will present the new work A letter from Joyce to Ibsen. Following her film and interest in Joyce, Garciá researched Joyce’s relationship to Norway and its language. A young James Joyce, who had studied Norwegian with the sole purpose of reading Ibsen in the original, wrote a letter to Ibsen on his seventy-third birthday in 1901, to manifest his admiration. The young man took pains to write it in Ibsen’s native language. While the original letter is lost and only the English draft remains, García has revived the lost communication string between the literary giants by her own forged version of the letter.

Alongside these works will also be parts of her ongoing and collective work Exile, 2012 – initiated by García as an homage to the work of Italian artist Aldo Piromalli; Mad Marginal Charts; fragments of The Inadequate, the large installation archive that occupied the Spanish pavilion in Venice in 2011; Exhausted Books II, a project conducted at the Bergen Triennale in 2013; Jacques Lacan Wallpaper, 2013 and an in situ version of her Doorstep Piece (Rodez), 2015.

Garcia’s interest in marginal voices, the repressiveness of words, and how marginality conveys something above and beyond the text, has taken various forms while always remaining connected to the central idea that marginality is an artistic position. Her research-based art makes it clear that, for her, the essential value of marginality in society and language and in the framework of the voice, which both surprise and confuse her work, lies in the meaning they create beyond the conscious limits of society and language. She shows us that no matter how irrational or obscure, a parallel social dynamic is being revealed through this marginality.

Curator: Maria C. Havstam

Finnegans Wake reading

On two occasions during the exhibition period, Dora García offered an opportunity for the public to participate in a performance – Finnegan’s wake reading – which took place at Gallery F15 on Thursday 16 April at 7pm and on Sunday 19 April at 1pm. This reading circle, led by the artist was a unique conceptual study of James Joyce’s literary world, where Finnegan’s wake was explored with the understanding and imagination of every participant.

Exhibition catalogue

Exhibition catalogue including introduction by the curator, texts by Kjetil Røed and Maria Lind and images from the exhibition will be published in week 16.

Book Mad Marginal Cahier # 4. I see words, I hear voices

The Book Mad Marginal Cahier # 4. I see words, I hear voices will bring together tropes from Dora García`s research around the concept she calls “Mad Marginal” – marginality as an artistic position. Cooperating partners are The Fonderie Darling Montreal, The Power Plant, Toronto, Illness as Metaphor, festival, Hamburg, The Academy of Fine Art, Oslo and Punkt Ø, Moss. Edited by Chantal Pontbriand and published by Sternberg Press Berlin.

Biography

Dora Garcia is an internationally recognized artist. She has represented Spain at the Venice Biennale in 2011 and was present again in 2013 with a work produced through Price Prince Pierre of Monaco, awarded the same year. She was one of the great figures exposing dOCUMENTA 13 in 2012 KLAU MICH: Radicalism in Society Meets Experiment on TV. Her work is largely performative and deals with issues related to community and individuality in contemporary society, exploring the political potential of marginal positions, paying homage to the eccentric characters, antiheroes. For several years, she has led the project called The Mad Marginal, in which she investigates figures from the literary history (Bertolt Brecht and James Joyce), psychoanalysis and other fields in the humanities.