Dora Budor Whitney Biennial Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 20 March — 11 August 2024

Dora Budor is participating in the eighty-first Whitney Biennial: Even Better Than the Real Thing curated by Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, with Min Sun Jeon and Beatriz Cifuentes. In a new film, Lifelike (2024) Budor explores Hudson Yards and its surrounding areas, the largest and most expensive private real estate development in American history, which opened in 2019 about a mile north of the Whitney. A gimbal-mounted iPhone captures the shimmering sites while a vibrating pleasure device attached to the camera disturbs their serenity, suggesting an alienation commonly experienced in cities increasingly dominated by corporate architecture and gentrification. Another new body of work on display are Dominoes (2023), in which large industrial rolls of abrasive cloths intended to remove a surface or lift a veneer become the ground for an image built up from placebo tablets rubbed onto the walls and floor of the artist’s studio. This process resembles that of automatic drawing, an improvisatory form developed by the Surrealists, who saw it as a means of revealing the unconscious. Just as the marks make the interior surfaces of the studio visible, they also point to the relationship between architecture and automatism. More information here.