Between Not Everything and Not Nothing
Barbara Bloom
Dora Budor
Park McArthur
20th September-26th October 2025
Critique is just a cutting tool, not the price of admission. A device for making little breathing holes in the suffocating fabric of reality.
—Marina Vishmidt
This exhibition in two parts—programmed by Broadside and Ivory Tars—engages with Infrastructural Critique, a term coined by the theorist Marina Vishmidt (1976–2024).
Infrastructural Critique seeks to problematise the limited scope of earlier forms of Institutional Critique, in order to create an immanent space in which the material conditions of contemporary life can be better apprehended and gestured beyond. Whilst not an attempt at a direct explication of Vishmidt’s far-ranging thoughts on the subject—there is no formal style or procedural approach that can be applied to her theories, and they are inimical to any overarching scheme of visual representation—this project acts as a proposition. As a way of articulating a series of operative contradictions around which these theories revolve.
A longer text can be found here.
Works List:
Billed as ‘the essential ingredients for a picture-perfect party in a convenient carrying case’, A Birthday Party for Everything is a kit designed to facilitate social gathering. Like many of Barbara Bloom’s editioned works (other examples include chocolate boxes and collections of luxury wrapping paper) it takes both as its subject matter and embodied form the gift economy, a world of favours seemingly set apart from the transactional logic of market exchange. A class of object to which artwork arguably has a familial relationship, also being located outside the typical conventions of waged labour. Conceived of as something that exists in an unlimited number, and emblazoned with motifs ranging from sub-atomic particles to celestial arrays, with the anthropocenic presence of human civilization appearing sandwiched somewhere between, Bloom’s offering speaks to questions of scale and repetition. A logo of a gift-wrapped present appears printed above an infinity symbol on several objects in this assemblage. Convivial forms of life are something we must claim back from our commitments to productive work. But these forms of life are, equally, inevitable.
One of what Dora Budor refers to as her ‘video sculptures’, Inner Vampire belongs to a series of DIY televisions constructed from repurposed champagne shipping boxes that the artist gathered in New York amid New Year’s celebrations, and which double as reproductions of the cube monitors familiar from standard museum displays. This lo-fi setup projects artificially restored and coloured scenes of Marcel L’Herbier’s 1928 silent film L’Argent. Based on a 1891 novel by Émile Zola, and set in then-contemporary Paris, L’Herbier’s film takes as its subject stock market speculation and the corruption it engenders. Budor’s creation of a cinematic architecture for this document to reside within, one fashioned from the hollow leftovers of celebrations, adds a further layer to this inter-generational dialogue. Viewed through the Fresnel lens, the distorted, nearly psychedelic effect is given a new spatial ambiguity by Budor, requiring viewers to orient themselves in order to bring it into view; an unbearable proximity which allows for the narrative, or distantiated blur of total abstraction. Embodying conflicting states of reception symptomatic of today’s spectatorship, these works are at once ultra-focused and ultra-distracted.
Originally presented as a part of a conference on access practices and disability studies in and beyond art institutions and museums, Day is a speculative invitation to take a trip to the beach. As a continuation of exploring lived processes of care and access, this video by Park McArthur is intended to be an encounter (seen and/or listened to) with the beach–and being together at the beach–across experiences of isolation. Charting several responses to the same hypothetical and aphoristic prompt (a day at the beach), McArthur’s script demonstrates a number of different registers with which this day trip to the beach might be engaged with. That scenario can be spoken about in terms of the structural limits or daily infrastructural failings that undergird and maintain isolation. But just as importantly it can and should also be spoken about from personal perspectives, sensory experiences, and shared memories that provisionally sustain us.
Photography: Patrick Jameson