Swiss Institute has presented Spring, the first institutional solo exhibition of New York-based Croatian artist Dora Budor (b. 1984). Through her work, Budor considers the representation of emotional and physical experience within the ideological subtexts of mainstream cinema. She focuses in particular on Hollywood production methods and special effects, where ideas transfer between states of materialization, fictionalization and digitalization. Using cinematic strategies of affect, Budor composes sculptures and architectural interventions that organically incorporate screen-used cinema props. She calls this process “reanimation,” acknowledging the objects’ fictional histories while re-contextualizing them in a second life.

Conceived as a hybrid of heating infrastructure and blood vessels, Budor’s sculptures at Swiss Institute wrap around architectural miniatures originally featured in the blockbuster films "The Fifth Element", "Batman Returns", and "Johnny Mnemonic". These structures, covered with artificial weathering, dust and dirt, become real-life fossils of on-screen experiences. In acts of architectural concrescence, mutation and circulation, the works hover on the edge of living as autonomous objects with death drives.

Of the surrounding blackness, Budor states: “Spurred by climate change, bacteria have reappeared on some of the world’s oldest mummies, rapidly decomposing their ancient skin into black slime. Once understood as stable, rigid and dead, biological and ecological forces have suddenly revived these deeply historical bodies in a Frankensteinian way – a symbolic indication of the current moment.”