Dora Maurer: Thinking in Proportions (region-free DVD)

Dóra Maurer once said that the theme central to her work is "movement in respect to the conceptual and factual effects of displacement". And indeed, her extensive oeuvre produced since the end of the 1960s consistently documents movement and displacement, specifically with regard to systematics and structurality. It is the duality emanating from a particular, predetermined system combined with the subsequent observation of unforeseen deviations and ruptures that characterizes the process Maurer realized in a multi-faceted form over the course of her artistic career: from her early graphic works to her displacements as she calls them, and culminating in the "quasi-images" that she derived from spatial painting in the 1980s and 90s. Since 1973 Maurer produced a series of films in loose succession that fit in with her investigation of structure and its inherent variability. Initially, these works were solely committed to the concept of repetition and the measurability of movement, but they increasingly became concerned with a conceptual questioning of the image, closely tied to momentary fragmentations of body, movement and space. The "systems" she utilized range from seemingly simple, everyday acts (i.e. the reading of a book), to highly abstract image sequences (i.e. the presentation of purely monochrome color fields). This broad spectrum indicates early on how Maurer´s methodical approach was for all intents and purposes quite universal, although it never explicitly spread to forms of political or social systematics. And yet there is an implicit concern ­ and perhaps thereby unconsciously more urgent - in regard to the possibility of "dropping out of the system," as art historian Judit Király maintains. 8 films, 109 minutes in total.