In 2019, the inaugural Outset Partners Grants Programme supported Dora Budor’s (b. Zagreb, 1984) first institutional solo exhibition in Europe I AM GONG, with an Impact Award. The exhibition investigated the architectural history of Kunsthalle Basel and its surroundings in order to use sound, dust, and environmental data from dissonant temporalities to create an evolving “score” for her exhibition.
Inspired in equal measure by science fiction, cinematic staging, and the overwhelming hybridization of nature with the human-made, the Croatian-born artist turned the exhibition into a reactive machine. The result was a disquieting exhibition experience, with artworks whose unfolding forms are modulated by invisible forces.
Can an exhibition–typically an assembly of discrete, immutable things on public display– function like a reactive organism? Can it, in that sense, be alive? And can it, in order to be so, be fed by a confluence of historical and real-time events that propel it through an everchanging choreography of transformation? These were the preoccupations underlying I am Gong.
The exhibition was curated by Elena Filipovic, Director of Kunsthalle Basel.
ON VIEW: 24th May 2019 - 11th August 2019.
