Part of the exhibition The Real Thing?

Courtesy of the artist and Starkwhite, Auckland

20 June-9 September 2013

    

Alicia Frankovich is interested in the encounter between art and materia humana. She puts bodies into situations where they play out relations, often engaging with social conventions and rituals. Taking up the legacy of durational performance and its inclusion of ordinary movements such as walking and running, Frankovich transposes these postures into the exhibition space, intertwining contemporary formations from athletic preparation, cognitive labor and creative production.

A Mindful Walker is composed of a bare-footed walker who circumambulates the galleries of the Palais de Tokyo, transforming the gesture of the walk into the ambiguous action of the flâneur: occupying the liminal space between the viewer and performer. The natural action of the walk is heightened by spontaneous outbursts of movement from the urban vocabulary of parcour, the practice of extreme walking, jumping and sliding in concert with the obstacles found in the city’s landscape. This metamorphosis of behaviour exposes the gallery architecture as well as the real and fictive constructions of social mobility, annulations where bodies, living and implied, twist and circulate in a multiplicity of spaces.

Alicia Frankovich b. 1980, lives and works in Berlin.