Artists

Noah Barker, Dora Budor

Press release

Dora Budor's and Noah Barker's collaborative practice emerges from their shared interest in cartographies of power and desire, in which the economic motives of development find a psychological resonance. The exhibition at n.b.k. is structured in two parts, both in terms of time and appearance. As a prelude to the premiere of their new video Monte Carlo Method taking place in November, a pairing of Budor's Lifelike (2024) and Barker's Juniper (2026) will be presented at the n.b.k Showroom in June. These works introduce the nature of their collaborative process – they meet on the grounds of a distorted state, conveying a sense of one's own psychophysical infrastructure. Dora Budor's video Lifelike (2024) articulates the perpetual abstraction of contemporary life. Shot in and around Hudson Yards in New York, it surveys the largest and most expensive private real estate development in U.S. history, which opened in 2019. A vibrating pleasure device, attached to the iPhone camera, disturbs a frictionless view of this commercial world, introducing a frisson of numbness and overstimulation. The guiding tempo of Lifelike is 'stuplimity'; coined by the cultural theorist Sianne Ngai, it describes "syncretism of boredom and astonishment." Noah Barker's Juniper (2026) gains its title from an eponymous Pacific Ocean nuclear test. By printing film stills of the blast on LSD blotter paper, the work suggests ingestion of 'the bomb', implicating countercultural self-realization in the Cold War complex of experimentation. Budor's and Barker's new video, Monte Carlo Method (2026), departs from a mathematical model used to estimate possible outcomes of uncertain events. Originating in the Manhattan Project and central to financial forecasting, the method structures the film examining a city and century built on chance.