Andrea Fraser

The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery is proud to present Canada’s first exhibition of work by American artist Andrea Fraser. Informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Fraser is well-known for her performances that appropriate different genres of public speech such as the museum tour and the inaugural address in order to critique the relations between the art institution, it’s patrons and its visitors. This exhibition consists of recent and new performance-based video work including Little Frank and his Carp (2001), Kunst muß hängen (Art’s Gotta’ Be Hanged) (2001), Soldadera (1998/2002) and Exhibition (2002).

In Little Frank and his Carp Fraser plays the persona of a museum visitor. Filmed with hidden cameras in the Guggenheim Bilbao, she is represented listening to the official audio guide, which advises visitors, among other things, to caress the building’s "powerfully sensual" curves. For Kunst muß hängen Fraser performed a drunken, impromptu speech by Martin Kippenberger, which she memorized in German. The effect is an ambivalent tribute to artistic ambivalence.

Soldadera (Scenes from Un Banquete en Tetlapayac) is an installation produced with footage shot by Rafael Ortega for the film directed by Olivier Debroise about Eisenstein at the Hacienda de Tetlapayac in Mexico. Soldadera juxtaposes scenes of Fraser appearing as Frances Flynn Paine, an associate of Abby Rockerfeller working in Mexico in the 1930s, with Fraser appearing as a revolutionary peasant.

Exhibition is based on Fraser’s participation in dancing with Rio de Janeiro samba school in Carnival and brings up issues about the artistic appropriations of popular cultural spectacles and its displacement into the art context.

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Andrea Fraser