Inserts in Real Time

Developed alongside García’s exhibition She Has Many Names earlier this year at M HKA, Antwerp, this remarkable book is the first monograph dedicated to the performance work of the artist Dora García. At its heart is a Chronology of all her performances and gestures from the past twenty years—listed, illustrated, described, and contextualized. This unique overview is framed by new political, feminist, and queer readings of various artworks offered by art historian Sven Lütticken, performance theorist Bojana Cvejić, and García herself, as well as a new conversation between the artist and curator Joanna Zielińska. In addition to a series of film stills from García’s latest film Amor Rojo (2023), the Appendix of Selected Scripts makes this archive an especially vivid relay of her decades of public experimentation, provocation, and activation.

Dora García is an artist and teacher who lives and works in Oslo. She is currently professor at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway. Her work is largely performative and deals with issues related to community and individuality in contemporary society, exploring the political potential of marginal positions.

Bojana Cvejić is author of several books, including Choreographing Problems (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Toward a Transindividual Self: A Study in Social Dramaturgy (co-written with Ana Vujanović, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, 2022). As a dramaturg, she has contributed to many performances and collective self-organized platforms for artistic production, critical theory, and education in Europe and former Yugoslavia.

Sven Lütticken is associate professor at Leiden University’s Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Netherlands, and teaches art history at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He recently published Art and Autonomy: A Critical Reader (Afterall, 2022) and Objections: Forms of Abstraction, Volume 1 (Sternberg Press, 2022).

Joanna Zielińska is an art historian, writer, and performance curator. The ideas of performative exhibition and performative artwork are fundamental in her curatorial research. Her practice is centered around theater, performance, performative literature, and visual arts. She works as a senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp (M HKA).