Dora Budor & Noah Barker

Dora Budor and Noah Barker's collaborative practice stems from their shared interest in cartographies of power and desire, where the pursuit of economic progress meets psychological resonance. As a prologue to the premiere of their new collaborative video work Monte Carlo Method at n.b.k. in November 2026, Budor's video work Lifelife will be shown in the n.b.k. Showroom in June, Budor's video work Lifelike (2024) and Barker's work series Juniper (2026) will be juxtaposed. The works are characteristic of their joint creative process - they deal with unstable states and convey a sense of one's own psychophysical infrastructure.

Lifelike (2024) by Dora Budor articulates the ongoing abstraction of contemporary life. Shot in and around Hudson Yards in New York, the video work examines the largest and most expensive private real estate project in US history, which opened in 2019. A vibrating sex toy attached to the iPhone camera prevents a clear rendering of the view of the surroundings, suggesting arousal, staleness and overstimulation. The pace of the work is determined by the term stuplimity, coined by the American cultural theorist Sianne Ngai, which describes a feeling of extreme exhaustion caused by a collapse of boredom (stupor) and astonishment (sublimity).

Juniper (2026) by Noah Barker refers to the nuclear weapons test of the same name conducted in the Pacific. The video stills of the explosion, printed on blotting paper, also refer to the form of administration of the hallucinogenic substance LSD and to experiments with the drug that took place in the context of both the counterculture and military efforts during the Cold War. The works on paper are also reminiscent of a film strip from an experimental flicker film and open up a parallel to cinematically produced intoxicated states.

Budor and Barker's new video work Monte Carlo Method (2026) is based on a mathematical model for estimating the possible outcomes of uncertain events. The method of the same name, which has its origins in the so-called Manhattan atomic project and is central to financial forecasting, structures the film, which examines a city and a century built on coincidences.

Dora Budor (*Croatia) and Noah Barker (*California) live in New York. Their collaborative video works have been shown at: mumok, Vienna (2025); MoMA PS1, New York (2024); Simian, Copenhagen (2023); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2022), among others.