Antenna Space is delighted to announce that the artist Dora Budor’s first solo institutional exhibition in the UK named Again is currently on view at Nottingham Contemporary, from January 27 – May 5, 2024, which features a series of newly commissioned works concerned with techniques of the built environment and various forms of psychosocial control induced by it.

Inherent to this is the development of “pastoral power” as an individualising and totalising force that continues to shape the social body. A population’s moral character is seen as a result of the vigilant oversight of modern government, drawn from the tradition of the pastorate. Budor locates the present-day pastoral complex in strategies of urban renewal, self-care industries, and sharing economies.

Proceeding from the formal language of sculpture, these practices are brought into relation with historical precedents, most famously, the enclosure of the commons, or more curiously, the discouragement of public urination.

Throughout the exhibition, states of intoxication, disobedience and transience are met with states of safety, well-being, and protection. These conditions are then re-encoded into works that both index and subvert the forms in which they are found. Again, we see the prioritisation of productivity and value extraction instruct the management of space to reform public behaviour. Again, places of leisure and recreation presume that citizens act firstly as consumers within the incessant palette of market choices. Again, order results as much from what is permissible in space as from how space itself is represented. Through these works, social control appears as a phenomenon that connects art and its conditions of viewership to developments in land management, architecture, pharmaceuticals, psychology and agriculture.

The images and text courtesy of the artist, Nottingham Contemporary and Antenna Space.