Regina Frank

Regina Frank (* 1965 in Meßkirch ) is a German artist. Since 1992 she has been one of the pioneers of performance with integration of the Internet and in connection with interactive software installations. Her works combine digital media, such as the Internet and computers, with traditional handicrafts, text and textiles. Her performances and installations deal thematically with social and political-societal issues.

Life

Regina Frank lived in Meßkirch until she graduated from high school in 1984. Interrupted by many foreign scholarships and stays in the USA, Japan, China, Taiwan, France and Portugal, she lived again and again in Messkirch and Berlin.

Act

The title "The Artist Is Present", used since 1988, became "The Artist Is Present" in 1989 and remained her title and motto for 25 years until 2015. After Marina Abramović chose the title "The Artist Is Present" for her exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art Frank eventually changed its title to “The Art Is Present” in 2015 with an emphasis on art. From 2015 she also uses the title “The Heart is Present” with the aim of focusing on the essentials of her work and on concentrating more on her mission as an artist.

Frank worked as a visionary with the Internet from 1992, later she developed social software with WeltWeitWeben and artistically dealt with encryption software. As early as 1994 she developed performances on the Internet via Telnet and CU-SeeMe software between Tokyo and London. In 1995 she wrote her first blog: for 97 days and in 2004/2005 she developed her first social network program for the Federal Environment Agency in Dessau / Berlin. From 2008 she developed light clothes that worked with solar energy, and from 2011 a solar bank and 2012 a solar tree that can be used to charge cell phones. Since 2011 she has been working with iLAND on environmental issues and since 2015 she has been researching a new project in particle research. Her trademark are huge dresses, with which she repeatedly takes up new abstract themes and gives them a visual form. The clothes with which she mostly appears in public spaces serve as a vehicle for discussions, to make data visible, topics that concern everyone, just like the clothes that touch us every day. "The Art Is Present" and "The Heart Is Present" are appropriate titles because they use abstract themes to make the incomprehensible tangible and visualize them again and again.

From 1998 to 1999 Frank taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and was resident artist at New York University , School of the Art Institute of Chicago , MIT , Boston and Bauhaus Dessau. Regina Frank lectured at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design , London, at New York University, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art , Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York, Art Institute of Chicago, at MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology , School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her work has been exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art , Serpentine Gallery , Staatliche Kunsthalle Berlin , Reina Sofia in Madrid, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles , Spiral Wacoal Art Center in Tokyo and at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, at ARCO in Madrid, the Art Institute in Chicago, Hannover Expo 2000, the Diego Museum of Art and the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art. Regina Frank has worked internationally since 1989 under the title "The Artist Is Present" in museums and in public spaces. Her first book "The Artist is Present" was published in 1999.

She started the installation performance iLAND in 2011 and in 2013 during the Venice Biennale (Infr'action). 2012–2015 she traveled with iLAND to Chicago, Munich, Portugal, Finland, France, Holland, England and China.

From 1989 to 1995 Frank studied at the Berlin University of the Arts and was a master class student with Katharina Sieverding . As a tutor, she taught photography and printmaking and organized many artist talks from 1990 to 1992, among others with Marina Abramović , John Cage , Joan Jonas , Alfredo Jaar , Antoni Muntadas , Joseph Kosuth , Dara Birnbaum , Christina Kubisch , Hans Haake, Guerilla Girls , Gretchen Faust, Stephen Willats, Ugo Dossi and Nan Goldin . She was a founding member of the student organization Interflugs, which conveyed student interests to administration and professors. Together with her fellow students, she campaigned for equal rights and called for a higher proportion of women as professors at the then predominantly male University of the Arts.

So she was active in the student strike. In addition to a number of subtle performances and photographic works dealing with political issues such as the Gulf War, AIDS, space and studio shortages, she worked artistically in an occupied house and later in a studio above an asylum home. She campaigned for equality, the integration of foreigners and the acceptance of homosexuals with various actions in public space and collected funds for various social purposes. (ShoeshineWoman, See that you don't Look, The artist is present, The Artist Is Present). “The artist is present” and “The Artist Is Present” was to be seen in the political-social sense as the presence and responsibility (response) of the artist.

So she managed to convince other artists to get involved anonymously under this title. So it is understandable that she later devoted herself to a relatively simple life, concentrating her energies on primarily charitable and social activities and largely withdrew from the international art market between 2006 and 2013.

From 1993 onwards, based on her own experience in the textile industry, she dealt with the global division of labor (global labor division) and in a 28-day performance drew attention to the global underpaid in the textile industry. So she sat in the window of the New Museum of Contemporary Art for 28 days and embroidered beads on a dress. Every day she received a different wage based on the average wage in 28 different countries. In the beginning she made $ 17.10 an hour, less every day until she ended up making 20 cents. She used them to buy flowers and bread every day, symbolically as food for body and soul and to make the purchasing power of her wages clearer. The wages were published in the Dow Jones share index. The installation at the time that was created during this performance was sold to Robert J. Shiffler's collection through Christies. Part of the proceeds went to a foundation that campaigned for the rights of illegally smuggled textile workers who were kept like slaves in small factories in New York sweatshops . The work was widely discussed, with several television reports appearing in Parade Magazine , Harper's Bazaar , Cosmopolitan and Vogue .

From 1993 she dealt with the internet as a steadily growing source of information and world brain and in works like "Hermes' Mistress" asked about the meaning of this flood of information by sitting 1777 hours in various museums and transferring information from the internet letter by letter to an island Embroidered dress. (26,000 letter beads) Exit Art , New York / Kunsthalle, Berlin / Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) , Los Angeles / Bronx Museum, New York / Reina Sofia, Madrid / Women's Museum (Bonn) / IAS, London / Spiral Wacoal Art Center, Tokyo / Kampnagel, Hamburg / UNESCO, Paris / Fondapol Paris / Shih Chien University (Taiwan)

In the Glasperlenspiel 1996 (named after the novel of the same name by Hermann Hesse ) she dealt with art as a source for international exchange and as a contribution to peace. (See MIT "Conversations at the Castle"). For this interactive performance installation she wove a “magic cloak” (kimono) from favorite books and quotes for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. The visitors were able to contribute to the installation via the Internet: with virtual pearls made of texts and poems (generated by a computer program). The result was a space in which there was no winner and no loser, an Olympic game for everyone - an opportunity to be present regardless of space and time. With the glass bead game, Frank succeeded in gaining acceptance on the Japanese market, which later spread to Taiwan and China. She worked with Pixelpark on the software and later with Media Service Group.

Between 1995 and 1999 Regina Frank worked with the internet and developed works like A-dress. Here she wrote a letter to her own dress every day for 97 days in the Winnipeg Art Gallery in Canada, representing the place and home (word play Dress / Address). The letter was available daily on a website, was printed on white sheets of paper, and filled the inside of her dress, linked to withered and inked leaves on the outside surface. The work was used as the cover picture for the book "Negotiating Domesticity" by Hilde Heynen and Gülsum Baydar, Routledge Verlag.

In 1999 she developed a mushroom dress in the Park Schloss Philippseich , and during the Expo 2000 in Hanover she sat in the shop window of the pavilion of the International Women's University and was linked to the stock exchange via a real-time connection and, with slow movements, reflected the rising and falling share curves as well as ours Entanglement with everyday human life.

In “Whiteness in Decay” at the San Diego Museum of Art, she asked: What nourishes your soul? She projected the more than 3000 answers onto a screen behind her. She was in plaster for this performance and slowly freed herself from the hard shell in order to then peel the fruits and vegetables from their plaster crust and share them with the audience.

In ILAND 2011–2015 she deals with environmental issues. iLAND shows the unbalanced zones of our planet together with intact landscapes that have not been hit by disasters in the last 500 years in a textile collage. Aerial photos and topographical images were modified, painted, printed and combined in photomontages. The dress and the sculpture became an island of discussion, a vehicle for communication and a field for mutual reflection. The skirt shows opposites on each side, for example floodplains and desert areas: if you fold the fabric, they symbolically align. In the performance it moves so slowly that the movement is perceived as a strong time lapse, just as the effect of our behavior is often when we look into the future or analyze the past.

membership

Independent Performance Group

Publications

Regina Frank. The Artist Is Present. Performances 1992–1999, Berlin, 1999, ISBN 3-00-004290-3

Performances, installations and exhibitions (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

^ First social network program for the UBA

↑ "Whiteness in Decay" in the San Diego Museum of Art ( Memento of the original from November 26, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2

personal data
SURNAME	Frank, Regina
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German performance artist
DATE OF BIRTH	1965
PLACE OF BIRTH	Messkirch

[1] First social network program for the UBA