Débora Delmar investigates the effects of globalisation on everyday life focusing on issues of class, gender, cultural hegemony and gentrification. This is borne from the omnipresent influence of the United States in Mexico (Delmar’s place of birth), and in the wider world. Within her practice she examines the contextual value of goods, analysing their systems of production, distribution and consumption.
In her installations Delmar frequently references the sanitised aesthetic utilised in non-spaces, a neologism coined by sociologist Marc Augé to describe places such as banks, airports as well as corporate and government buildings, which are commonly under surveillance. She’s particularly interested in the psychological and behavioural influence of this kind of architecture. Physical barriers working as metaphors for political and societal restrictions have been a recurrent subject matter in recent projects. Delmar often works with appropriated images and objects, as well as with local production processes and direct architectural interventions. She frequently incorporates immaterial components within her exhibitions such as video, text, sound, scent, and situations.
Through her Stanley Picker Fellowship, Delmar explored strategies of working within systems, contracts, relationships and institutions. By incorporating the contractual structure of the Fellowship and exploring how to set up a trust in her own name, she scrutinised artistic labour as a form of currency.
As an outcome of her Fellowship, Delmar’s solo exhibition will expand on the multiple meanings of the word Trust, and build on her recent interests in how value is generated through the financial world, as well as through physical and symbolic impacts of architecture present in gentrification, consumerism and surveillance in the urban environment.
Delmar has a special interest in the relatively new phenomenon of gated communities in her home country Mexico and in the much longer history of these spaces in the UK and elsewhere. As an architectural intervention within the exhibition, she has created a large gate with the workshops at Kingston School of Art, that is based on an original side-gate at the nearby Picker House, designed in the 1960s by architect Kenneth Wood. The piece will divide the exhibition space and create a conceptual gateway connecting the gallery and Stanley Picker’s former home.