ALICIA FRANKOVICH

Frankovich works with notions of performance, using video, sculpture and photographs as well as the live body. Bodies and Situationsanalyses equivalences between different modes of language. Forms and movements in her works pertain to movements and materials of the body and elicit a sense of social and urban critique. Frankovich also cites pop-cultural references like games and films, as well art works from the twentieth century but diverts these moments into a new spatial and social discourse.

Frankovich presents a suite of new and recent sculptures, photographs and short films including: Man walked on the moon Volution , Genet Piece, Egg happening Stuttgart and Jumping guy (live). Frankovich will show her first 35 mm piece Volution, following strong reception at Dublin Contemporary 2011 where it was reviewed in frieze as one of ‘several strong works’. In this short film Frankovich set up a boxing scene that morphs into a dance at Berlin’s Kottbusser Tor. Loosely citing a boxing scene from Charlie Chaplin’s ’City Lights’, the roles of the boxers and referee become confused. She both constructs and participates in a scenario that is simultaneously spontaneous and controlled. A group of dilettante and trained figures including a ‘Street University’ kid, a dancer, impulsively-invited friends and the artist herself, all swing and turn in multiple rotations.

Frankovich puts bodies into situations where they play out relations testing social conventions and behaviours. In her recent works, she has taken fragments from autobiographical life encounters or as moments pulled from art history, constructing new choreographies and situations - presenting them in the forms of recorded situations and direct encounters with kinetic sculptures and also with real people.

Recently described by Dominic Eichler in Frankovich’s publication Film/Body/Gesture Alicia Frankovich: Book of Works:

“In various ways Frankovich’s compositions mount symbolic attacks on things like the conventionally static frames offered by cultural spaces, and the expectation of contemplative calm when viewing material misused into sculpture. Duration, suspension, push and pull, the exertion of the artist or her performers’ skill-sets and muscles, motors, ropes and apparatuses are all deployed. Typically, physical action is presented as a kind of rupture, resistance or struggle, as something risky, half- remembered or alien, intentionally unmastered or fleeting. Every movement we make, even mindlessly, relies on our own body memories. Performing an action, or isolating and consciously repeating a movement, however slight, allows for an examination and raises the question of subscribing meaning which brings to the fore the interaction of the embodied subject and cultural interpretation. Repetitive movement is both machine-like and the all-too-human basis of most learning and labour.”

Born in Tauranga 1980, Alicia Frankovich currently lives and works in Berlin. Her recent exhibition and performance highlights include: (2011): Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, (solo), Dublin Contemporary, City Within the City, Artsonje Center, Seoul, Burn what you cannot steal, Galerja Nova, Zagreb, Floor Resistance, Hebbel Am Ufer, HAU 3, Berlin (2011); Undisciplined Bodies; an Evening Dissolving Social and Spatial Conventions, Salon Populaire, Berlin; (2010): Effigies, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, NEW010 , Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne,The 4th Auckland Triennale, Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon, Auckland City Art Gallery; (2009): A Plane for Behavers, ARTSPACE, Auckland (solo), Picturing the Studio, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; (2008): International Prize for Performance, Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea Trento. Frankovich has recently published her first monographic catalogue: Film/Body/Gesture/ Alicia Frankovich: Book of Works, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2011. In 2012 Frankovich will take up a three-month residency at AIR Antwerp.