Dagmar Buhr

Lives and works in Nuremberg, Germany

Artist statement

Dagmar Buhr’s works are conceived site-specifically and realized in situ. In terms of both space and content, they engage with their exhibition venues, their identities, and their surroundings. They often operate in the boundary zone between institutional and public space – or at the intersection of interior and exterior spaces – where they shift the functions and accessibility of these spaces or allow them to merge, thereby entering into a dialogue with chance passersby. In public or semi-public spaces – sometimes as an extension of institutional exhibitions – her works manifest as infiltrations that need not be immediately recognized as art, though they can be sensed as such. Real or artificial spaces that are still generally associated with masculinity – such as soccer stadiums, sex shops, or men’s magazines – are taken over or infiltrated as a matter of course, without explicitly postulating this as a feminist act. Language, texts, terms, and words are central elements in Dagmar Buhr’s artistic practice: as research material, as semantic material in the process of fragmentation and recontextualization, and as a starting point for the development of visual form in the chosen medium. Language becomes visual material that – when given a clear form – contrasts with associative thinking. What is missing is just as relevant as what is present. Language is fragmented, recontextualized, and left to the viewers’ associative imagination.

Artwork