Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Floor 5

Born 1984 in Zagreb, Croatia
Lives in New York, NY

In Lifelike, Dora 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.

In Dominoes, 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 the unconscious.