Andrea Fraser is widely recognised as one of the most radical voices of institutional critique. Her work deploys rigorous conceptual analysis, humour, and pathos to question the social, economic, and political systems embedded within cultural institutions and practices, exposing our entanglements and implicit participation within these systems.

The six works on view in the current exhibition represent a selection from four decades of work that highlights Fraser’s provocative and self-reflexive approach to examining national, cultural, and social identity.

In the North Gallery and North Viewing Room four works dating from 1989 to 2003 introduce a dialogue between the mediums of performance, video, photography, text, and sculpture. These works demonstrate the range of Fraser’s longstanding engagement in the critique of cultural experience economies, from global tourism to international survey exhibitions, to, most famously, museum tours. In these, Fraser examines the relationship between racism, colonialism, nationalism, and cultural appropriation.

__Welcome to the Wadsworth (1991), one of Fraser’s early museum tours, examines the Yankee ethno-nationalism pervading the museum’s discourse and how it connects to economic and racial segregation. White People in West Africa (1989/1991/1993) applies Fraser’s reflexive critique to tourism and colonial relations through the medium of Fraser’s own tourist photography. Reporting from São Paulo, I’m from the United States (1998), comprise five broadcasts about the Bienal de São Paulo created for Brazilian television, linking its theme of anthropophagy to neo-colonialism, globalization, and wealth concentration. Finally, Fraser’s Um Monumento às Fantasias Descartadas (A Monument to Discarded Fantasies), 2003, a monumental sculpture composed of discarded carnival costumes collected by the artist in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, serves as a poetic materialization of the potential fluidity of identity.

In the South gallery, the New York premiere of Fraser’s recent This meeting is being recorded, 2021, will be shown: a 99-minute performance-based video installation that examines race, gender, and age in an intergenerational group of seven White women, including Fraser herself. Based on transcripts of six 90-minute discussions organised by Fraser in 2020, the women apply psychoanalytic group relations methods to the task of examining their internal racism and their roles in White supremacy. In the process, they must work through their anxieties, vulnerabilities, hatreds, and longings. Fraser embodies all seven women–their individual personas, verbal intonations, and mannerisms–in a tour-de-force performance recorded in a single shot. Performed directly to the camera, the work pulls the viewer into the complex dynamics of projection, identification, and othering as it excavates the unconscious and emotional underpinnings of racism and raciallisation in White women.

Accompanying this video installation, Fraser presents a new work, This meeting is being recorded: Rehearsal script draft 11, table 8, 2021/2022, which extends her long history of data- and text-based works, and her deep connection to the traditions of Conceptual art practice. In tables and text installed along an adjacent wall, the work lays out the content of the video in clinical detail, revealing the objectification and analysis involved in the process of its making, providing a counterpoint to the empathic and emotional pull of the performance.

Fraser’s work has been exhibited in solo shows at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2022); the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art, PA; Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany (both 2021); the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (both 2016); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, Austria (2012); and at Harvard University, MA (2010), amongst many others. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona, Spain and MUAC UNAM Mexico City (both 2016), the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria (2015), Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany (2013), and at the Kunstverein, Hamburg, Germany (2003).

In 1993 she represented Austria at the 45^th Venice Biennale alongside Christian Philipp Müller and Gerwald Rockenschaub. She participated in the 1993 and 2012 Whitney Biennial exhibitions, the 1998 and 2021 editions of the Bienal de São Paulo, Prospect 3 New Orleans in 2014, and the 12^th Shanghai Biennale in 2018. Her project 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics (2018) was named the best art book of the decade by ARTnews.

Fraser has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship (2017); the Oscar Kokoschka Prize, Austria (2015); the Wolfgang Hahn Prize, Cologne, Germany (2013); the Anonymous was a Woman Fellowship (2012); the Art Matters Inc. Fellowship (1996-1997, 1990-1991 and 1987-1988); National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship (1991-1992); and Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art Award (1990-1991.)