Dora García - She Has Many Names

Dora García
She Has Many Names
10.02. - 21.05.2023

The exhibition She Has Many Names by Spanish artist Dora García is a survey of some of the most important performance works, drawings, installations, printed matter and films created throughout her career spanning three decades. 

Dora García's practice is performative and deals with issues related to community and individuality in contemporary society, exploring the political potential of marginal positions and paying homage to eccentric characters and antiheroes. These characters have often been the centre of her film projects, such as The Joycean Society (2013), Segunda Vez (2018) and Amor Rojo (2023). An essential aspect of García’s work is entanglement with political movements such as feminism and the way they occupy public spaces. The notion of collectiveness in her work relates to the political potential of love, friendship, companionship, or a way of working and transforming social environments.

The present exhibition is the first to focus on a central element in García’s work, namely her performative practice situated at the intersection of visual and performing arts, and includes elements of theatre, psychoanalysis and literature. Important references for the artist are Jacques Lacan, James Joyce, Oscar Masotta, Gloria Anzaldúa and Alexandra Kollontai among others. 

She Has Many Names investigates the relationship between audience, artwork and space, referring to the performative gesture of drawing and writing, the performativity of language and the act of speech. Performance works and drawing installations are activated during this project according to a precisely scripted scenario.

The title of the exhibition refers to a poem by the Chicana-Tejana* lesbian, feminist writer and activist Gloria Anzaldúa from her book Borderlands / La Frontera (1987) in which she challenges the way we understand identity by presenting it as a disputed social, psychological, political and cultural concept. Ideas elaborated by Anzaldúa are close to the critical practice of Dora García, who in her work refers to concepts such as the juncture of cultures, class struggles and different notions of borders in connection with physical and mental spaces. The new feature film Amor Rojo (2023) will premiere during the exhibition. The work is part of a large research project based on the historical figure Alexandra Kollontai, a Soviet revolutionist and radical feminist. The experimental film discusses the tradition of over one hundred years of feminism in Europe and Latin America and explores how transnational forms of feminism correlate with ecological and postcolonial struggles. The latest wave of feminism in Latin America agrees with Kollontai that feminism must go beyond the struggle for equality of rights for men and women and that a complete change of paradigm, a subversion of society, is necessary.

∗   Chicana: a woman of Mexican descent living in the United States; Tejana: a woman of Spanish or Mexican descent descended from people who settled in Texas before the area became part of the United States of America.