Dora Budor

Undercurrents in collaboration with LC Queisser Dora Budor, Rafik Greiss, Joyce Joumaa, Simon Lässig, Elene Latchkepiani, and Ser Serpas

Opening 30 January, 6 — 9pm 31 January — 7 March 2025

Molitor and LC Queisser are pleased to present Undercurrents, a group show of six artists linked by their explorations of materiality, value, and the affective conditions of late-capitalist life. These artists explore how modulations of form, space, and context can subjectively counter the greater forces of displacement, entropy, and privatization. Through a diversity of media, including sculpture, installation, video, and photography, they reassert their subjective claim over and against arbitrary powers that seem beyond anyone’s control. Myth and superstition emerge both as capitalist ciphers and as remedies against the arbitrary construction and circularity of value.

On the ground floor, a photographic collage by Rafik Greiss employs a technique of defamiliarization. As the Rush Comes (2023) comprises photographs, displayed in a fragmentary arrangement and mounted on Japanese paper, charting a trajectory of travel across the globe: unmade beds, laundry lines, ruined buildings, and sublime earthly landscapes emerge from the transitory interspaces of tunnels. Taken between Tskaltubo, Georgia, and Tsuruoka, Japan, they conjure states of intimacy and absence amid the kaleidoscopic effect of transfer.

Dora Budor continues her investigation into urban development, psychosociality, performativity, and privatization through new works. Vintages (2025) and Drama in a Dramatised Society (2025) incorporate purpose-built televisions constructed from used champagne shipping boxes that the artist gathered amid New Year’s Day celebrations from the streets of New York. Mounted on the wall, like air conditioning units, or on a plinth like standard museum monitors, they display videos through a Fresnel lens which produces a distortive and nearly psychedelic effect. They frame the effects of continuous inebriation as part of the compact of late-capitalist urban life via a continually-renewed contract of altered states. These are paired with blue horses (2024), Instax polaroids printed directly from the phone, which capture Citibikes in New York that have been permanently freed from the docking stations, and left to roam within the urban landscape.

Ser Serpas culls found and discarded items from the streets of cities she has traveled to for work, repurposing them to reflect the shifting mythologies and belief systems of everyday life. Her work highlights the often-violent inversions of value, where a prized object can become trash and vice versa. Serpas’ triangular structures, assembled from objects originally found on the streets of Naples, embody movement, impermanence, and transformation. They function as both a record of transience and a critique of systems that dictate worth and ownership.

The untitled works of Elene Latchkepiani develop out of an intuitive and organic method that explores the materiality of objects and the inner structures of form, process, material, and space. Her paintings are materially-driven explorations, incorporating organic materials such as concrete, gypsum, and paint. Using primarily wood and clay, a series of amalgamic sculptures manifest the intricacies of form and the timelessness of material.

Joyce Joumaa’s work employs economic reason against itself to reveal the group psychology that arose from the economic collapse and liquidity crisis in Lebanon. By the start of 2019, the rapid devaluation of the Lebanese lira instilled a collective sense of distrust vis-à-vis the central banking system. Joumaa activates an old confluence between human signature and monetary value; old banknotes or cheques needed to be signed to assert their validity as currency. Superimposed on images of lira banknotes, the signature-like motifs in her prints—each individually numbered—play with scale and abstraction, highlighting a near-superstitious collective fixation on abstract figures, mirroring the iterative recalculations required in daily life and the specious circularity of value.

Simon Lässig’s work focuses on the artificiality of social conditions, drawing from research on filmic archives to demonstrate the manipulated nature of the real. Lässig’s silver gelatin print, In a room of 497 × 239 cm, each wall measuring 250 cm in height, a window of 146 × 134 cm on the left wall, a door of 111 × 200 cm on the wall facing me. Being without motion, I look at the other, measure myself against every movement they make, for I see what they see and see it as they see it: without colour, as angles and distances (2023) is printed on historic “ORWO” paper from the GDR. The image shows a slightly abstracted torso appropriated from a Hungarian film, drawing on the filmic tradition of documentary-fiction that emerged in the 1970s in Hungary that emphasized transparencies, stillness, and suspended movements in a style of filmic “Quasirealism.”