Something To Remind Me, 2020
Rental bicycle
11 parts, each approx. 7.5 × 36.5 × 16.5 cm
Base: 60 × 60 × 20 cm
Dora Budor not only creates site-specific installations but also "reanimates" objects, as she puts it. In her site-specific installations, she analyses buildings and institutions as systems that are subject not only to tectonic and infrastructural conditions but also to social, human aspects. She gives her "reanimated" objects a "second" life in the exhibition space, with the elements still conveying a sense of their origins and original purpose. In this way, Budor enables the viewer to experience the physical and emotional effects of ideological subtexts. Influenced by her studies of architecture and her fascination for film, she is particularly interested in how film culture creates emotions and inscribes itself into the collective consciousness.
For Something To Remind Me, Budor investigates the appropriation and reinterpretation of art historical narratives along with questions of cycles, mobility and ownership. While staying in Berlin in 2020, she hired a bicycle from a rental business whose bikes must never be sold. The bicycle recorded her daily movements like a map. At the end of her stay, she had it melted down and made eleven multiples inspired by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's Enduring Ornament (1913).
In recent research, this mysterious object is discussed as possibly being the first ever ready-made – perhaps having been created at the same time as or even prior to Marcel Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel (1913). Its original purpose is not known. Freytag-Loringhoven is believed to have discovered the iron ring on the way to her wedding in New York, interpreting it as a female symbol of Venus. Budor was permitted to borrow the original and take a cast. By replicating it with the material of a rental bicycle not for sale, she not only reflects on ownership but also points out how art history is constantly being written anew.
"One of the main concerns of my work is how to destabilize and explode the boundaries of 'being an object'—in other words, how to expand an idea of the artwork from a solid and finalized thing into a protean and evolving network of interactions and relations."
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