artist lecture: vera frenkel (new date!)

Art and Art History Presents

Vera Frenkel

Thursday 18 March 2010 (note: new date!)
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.

Sheridan B124
1430 Trafalgar Road, Oakville




Rooted in an interrogation of the abuses of power and their consequences, projects by multidisciplinary artist Vera Frenkel have been seen at documenta IX, Kassel; the Offenes Kulturhaus Centrum für Gegenwartskunst, Linz; the Setagaya Museum, Tokyo; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Biennale di Venezia (Club Media, 1997; Head Start, 2001) among other important venues.
Frenkel’s videotapes, installations, photographs, writings, audio works and new media projects explore the forces at work in human migration, experiences of displacement and deracination, their effect on the learning and unlearning of cultural memory, and the increasing bureaucratization of everyday life.
Frenkel’s video-photo-web project on art theft as cultural policy, Body Missing, installed most recently at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst (MAK), Vienna, 2008, was the focus of From Theft to Virtuality, an international conference on the artist’s work organized at the ICA, London, by art historian, Griselda Pollock. The conference papers will form the basis for the first published anthology on Vera Frenkel’s work.
The Institute™: Or, What We Do for Love, a touring installation and a website on the theme of a dysfunctional cultural institution, was seen most recently at the National Gallery of Canada as part of the exhibition of work by recipients of the Governor General’s Award in Media and Visual Arts.
Frenkel’s newest video, ONCE NEAR WATER: Notes from the Scaffolding Archive, received its world première at the Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam (November, 2008), and its Canadian première at the Isabel Bader Theatre, Toronto (April, 2009).
A mid-career survey of Frenkel’s video works, the Spotlight at the Images Festival of Film, Video and New Media, curated by Dot Tuer, provided the core selection to which new material was added for Of Memory and Displacement / Vera Frenkel: Collected Works, a four disk DVD/CD-ROM boxed set available from Vtape Distribution, Toronto.




Image: video still from ONCE NEAR WATER: Notes from the Scaffolding Archive