The exhibition Dora García. Second Time Around centres on the artist Dora García (Valladolid, 1965), embarking on an open journey around a broad array of her works in diverse formats and mediums — film, performance, texts, drawings — and punctuating some of the constants running through her career. The show outlines the complex network of intellectual reference points — from literature to more marginal or heterodox frames of reference – her artistic practice draws from as it circulates fiction, performance and what García refers to as the “illusion of the human psyche” produced by everything.

The title, Second Time Around, originates from Julio Cortázar’s homonymous story, written in 1974, which recounts the climate of psychosis and uncertainty caused by the trauma of disappearances in Argentina. Second Time is also the name of García’s most recent project, which orbits the figure of Oscar Masotta, a contemporary of Cortázar’s and a pivotal theorist in the Argentinian avant-garde from the 1950s to the 1970s. Masotta’s ideas on constructing happenings and audience have also given rise to four short films and a film by the artist.

Expressly for the exhibition, Dora García has created a site-specific project for the Museo’s Vaults Gallery: a sound and object installation realised with her frequent collaborator, musician Jan Mech, and based on Franz Kafka’s short story The Cares of a Family Man, published in 1919. Moreover, the new project alludes to mysterious beings who, like the character Odradek in Kafka’s story, live under stairs, in basements, and will still be there when we are gone. Curators: Manuel Borja-Villel y Teresa Velázquez. (Museo Reina Sofía press-release)