ALICIA FRANKOVICH

Frankovich’s practice investigates how the physicality and behaviour of a body operates within social settings and constructs – including plays of dominance and re-negotiating the audience/performer relationship. She frequently calls on a plurality of existing groups to enact her choreographed performances. These have included the LGBT community, amateur performers, pregnant women, migrants, professional dancers, general individuals, and bush doofers (those who attend Australian outdoor dance parties). The core groups perform a sequence of movements and gestures which the artist has sampled from sources as diverse as team-building exercises, rugby matches, office culture and Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Subverting restrictive definitions of gender, race and class-bound codes of movement, and the dynamics of public space, Frankovich proposes a multitude of post-human futures.

Frankovich’s performances are matched by a parallel practice that asks us to reconsider the body as a critical landscape through which various discourses of encounter, technology, and self can be reconsidered. Her most recent body of work has seen the artist direct her practice within a microscopic focus to explore the phenomenon of microchimerism or the existence of the DNA of others within our own bodies.

Alicia Frankovich was born in New Zealand and lives and works in Canberra, Australia. She holds PhDs in Fine Arts from the Australian National University, Canberra (2019), and from Monash University, Melbourne (2022). She was the Australian Government Research Training Programme Scholar at the Australian National (2010-2020).

Courtesy Starkwhite