Air

Dora Budor / Origin I (A Stag Drinking) ; Origin II (Burning of the Houses) ; Origin III (Snow Storm) 2019 (opposite above) Origin III (Snow Storm) 2019 (installation view, Kunsthalle Basel 2019) (opposite below) Joseph Mallord William Turner / Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth exhibited 1842 / Collection: Tate, Seeing the building site translated into an ephemeral drift of colour raises ecological questions — what does it mean to change the city’s topography so profoundly and quickly? — as well as aesthetic ones — what elements of a built space remain hidden to us? Is our experience of architecture informed by concrete foundations and pipes, or even by the systems of resource extraction and global supply chains? Budor originally trained as an architect, and she engages with these unremarkable or concealed spaces of our built environment. Air was ‘put to work’ in another of the artist’s projects Termites 2022, in which she placed remote-controlled sex toys in the air-conditioning ducts of Kunsthaus Bregenz, in Austria. Their pulsations against the metallic ducts seeped into the space through the discreet slits on the edges of the room. In this active performance, reverberations spread throughout the gallery space without visitors knowing the source; the sound infecting the air, and imbuing each artwork with an anxious hum. Here, and in Origin I–III , air provides a pathway for the artist to enter and contaminate the building system, so she might reveal the latent components of architecture. Dora Budor’s Origin I–III produces beautiful symphonies of colour, but, if we look longer, our minds might wander to questions of our cities’ infrastructure, the soil beneath the constructed environment, and the cycles of air and labour that travel through every building. SR 81 80 Atmosphere Atmosphere