Regina Frank

Regina Frank is a German artist mainly working with text and textile installation and performance. Since 1989, she has been one of the pioneers of combining performance art with technology, integrating the Internet and interactive social software installations. Her performances and installations deal with social and political-social issues and link digital media with traditional text transformed into textiles.

Early life and education Frank was born in 1965, the daughter of Elisabeth Frank and Franz Josef Frank. She grew up in Meßkirch, Germany, where she kept a home until the death of her mother 2016. Due to the families’ and her home-towns close connection to Martin Heidegger, she devoted much of her youth to art and philosophy, later venturing into Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. She studied Sinology and Sanskrit, Old Oriental Studies at Freie Universität Berlin until she got accepted at the costume design department and later at the Visual Arts Department at Universität der Künste Berlin.

Here she did her Masters with Katharina Sieverding. As a tutor she taught photography and printing and organized many artist talks between 1990 and 1992, among others with John Cage, Joan Jonas, Marina Abramović, Alfredo Jaar, Antoni Muntadas, Joseph Kosuth, Dara Birnbaum, Christina Kubisch, Hans Haacke, Guerilla Girls, Stephen Willats and Nan Goldin. at the still predominantly male college of arts. Consequently, she was very active in the student strike.

In addition to a number of subtle performances and photographic works dealing with political themes, such as golf war, AIDS, she held her studio first in a squat and later above a homeless asylum in Berlin. "The Artist Is Present" was seen in the political-social sense as presence and response-ability of the artist. Together with a group of friends she was crashing opening parties in painters protection suits and masks made from photocopies of self-portraits of famous painters such as Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh demonstrating for artists rights. She lived various times as Frank going out with a mustache and side-burns. She actively danced Tango from 1986 onwards and did many public performances with one female or one male partner, on a private occasion she danced with/for Astor Piazzolla, while he was improvising on his Bandoneon. was published in 1999. Inspired by the adaptation of Regina Frank's title at Marina Abramović's MOMA exhibition The Artist Is Present after 21 years in 2010, Frank changed to "The Art is Present" in 2015, introducing the focus on the Art: going deeper into the present and the artist's gift. Later 2017 she advanced to the motto and overall title “The HeArT is Present”. Using the dress to address, her work is a creative information processing, data visualization, bridging handiwork and technology, tangible and virtual, creating incentives for communication, discussion and dialogues.

Frank has lectured at M.I.T. Boston, Saint Martin's School of Art London, New York University, the MET, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She was artist in resident at Wacoal Art Center, in Tokamachi and S-AIR Sapporo in Japan, Kio-A-Thau Residency Taiwan, Guangzhou-Live-4 China, Montalvo Arts Center, USA, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain and Chienkuo Technology University Taiwan. Her works have been displayed at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Serpentine Gallery in London, the Bronx Museum in New York, Kunsthalle in Berlin, Reina Sofia in Madrid, MOCA in Los Angeles, Spiral Wacoal Art Center in Tokyo and at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, ARCO in Madrid, 2001 Expo Hannover and 2003 San Diego Museum of Art. iLAND launched in 2011 and in 2013 during the Venice Biennale (Infr’action) and 2017 at London Artfair. Since 2013 iLAND was shown in the US, Portugal, Finland, France, Holland and China and 2018 at the MAAT (Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology) in Lisbon.

Frank's work has been featured in many publications including: Sculpture Magazine, Studio Art Magazine, Asahi Evening News, Studio Voice, Screen Multimedia, Parade Magazine, Harper's, The New York Times, in Time Out Rethinking Marxism, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Frankfurter Rundschau, FAZ, Japan Times, Contemporary Art, Art Papers, Art Examiner, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Art Press, Being on Line, Arte y Parte, Public Art and Ecology On the Issues Magazine and Allgemeine Zeitung.

Works L’Adieu Pearls before Gods (1993) Similar to the later "blogging", she wrote a letter to her own dress every day for 97 days, acting as an address. The letter was available daily on a website, but at the exhibition at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in Canada, the texts were printed on white sheets, and filled the inside of her dress, linked to withered and ink-dyed leaves on the outer surface. The work was used as a cover for the book "Negotiating Domesticity" by Hilde Heynen and Gülsum Baydar, with the Museum of Modern Art and SAIR residency in Sapporo which she continued in Taiwan, Germany, France, UK and Portugal until 2011 for seven years, spending 7 minutes to 7 hours in silence with complete strangers.

From 2005 to 2007 she developed Dreamweaving a game for children and adults encoding text into images, turning poetry into pictures and again text into textile. The game was available in English, German and Portuguese, due to a grant by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

In 2005 she worked on the social software and performance project Constellations She continued working on Sharing Silence as an ongoing performance and developed several unpublished performances investigating the ready made of Marcel Duchamp within. It was supposed to lead into the culminating phase of "The Artist is Present," a 28-year project, conceived in 1989, but when Marina Abramović used her title at MOMA, she realized that the artist could be confused with the body mind organism and changed. "The HeArt is Present" was dropping the "ist" of the Artist in favor of a greater self and a less personal identity and a reminder for the inspiring entity within all of us. It is also during this time that she returns to her painting and drawing, culminating in an exhibition at her home town at Meßkirch Castle entitled "The Art is Present" in 2017 after her seven-year-sabbatical.

iLAND 2011–2018, is a series of performances in public space, (streets, beaches, landings etc.), dealing with environmental issues. iLAND shows the imbalanced zones of our planet in a textile collage together with intact landscapes, which have not yet been haunted by disasters in the last 500 years. Aerial photographs and topographical images were changed, painted, printed and combined in photomontages. The dress and the sculpture became an island of discussion, a vehicle for communication and a field for common reflections. In her performance, she moves so slowly that the movement can only be perceived in time-lapse, almost like the growth of a plant, as we see the effect of our actions often only after when we fast forward.

Regina Frank's work is inspired by Sufism (Rumi), Zen meditation, and Advaita Vedanta. Poets such as Fernando Pessoa and various Philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger. Samuel Beckett could be seen as an important influence, as well as Johannes Vermeer, Henri Michaux, Joseph Beuys, as well as the German Fluxus movement.

Membership

Publications Regina Frank. The Artist Is Present. Performances 1992–1999, Berlin, 1999, Regina Frank. The Art Is Present – On Paper, Freier Berliner Verlag, Berlin, 2015, Regina Frank. The HeArt Is Present Regina Frank – In Space, Freier Berliner Verlag, Berlin, 2015, Conversations at The Castle: Changing Audiences and Contemporary Art, by Mary Jane Jacob and Michael Brenson, Homi K. Bhabha, MIT Press, USA, 1998, pp. 20–25, Divisions of Labor, Lydia Yee, catalogue, Bronx Museum of the Arts / MOCA, Los Angeles, USA, 1995

Performances, Installations and Exhibitions (selection) The Art Is Present – Regina Frank, Meßkirch, 2015 Das Netz, der Stoff und das Dazwischen, 2013 Kunstbiennale „Vogelfrei“, Jagdschloss Kranichstein, FAZ, 2011 Ästhetik mit Energiekonzept vereint, 2008 Konstellationen, Umweltbundesamt, PDF, 2005 L'Adieu Pearls before Gods, Rethinking Marxism L'Adieu Pearls before Gods, New Museum Archive