Brooklyn Commons: Tehching Hsieh and Alicia Frankovich

About

Join us on July 26th as Tehching Hsieh and Alicia Frankovich discuss their work, time and performance.

Brooklyn Commons, an ongoing discussion series at ISCP, presents intellectual and artistic pairings between the established Brooklyn-based artist community and ISCP residents. This series puts artists in conversation who have not shared a dialogue in the past and focuses on cultural practitioners living and working in Brooklyn, both long- and short-term.

Tehching Hsieh was born on December 31, 1950 in Nan-Chou, Taiwan. Hsieh dropped out of high school in 1967 and took up painting. After finishing his compulsory military service, Hsieh had his first solo show at the gallery of the American News Bureau in Taiwan. Shortly after this solo show, Hsieh stopped painting. He made a performance action, Jump Piece, in which he broke both of his ankles. He trained as a seaman, which he then used as a means to enter the United States. In July 1974, Hsieh finally arrived at a small port near Philadelphia. He was an illegal immigrant in the States for fourteen years until he was granted amnesty in 1988. Starting in the late 1970s, Hsieh made five One YearPerformances and a “Thirteen Year Plan,” inside and outside his studio in New York City. Using long durations, making art and life simultaneous, Hsieh achieved one of the most radical approaches in contemporary art. The first four One YearPerformances made Hsieh a regular name in the art scene in New York; the last two pieces, intentionally retreating from the art world, set a tone of sustained invisibility. Since 2000, released from the restriction of not showing his works during a thirteen-year period, Hsieh has exhibited his work around the world and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Alicia Frankovich was born in 1980 in Tauranga, New Zealand, and lives and works in Berlin. Frankovich holds an MFA from Monash University, Melbourne, and completed a BVA in sculpture at AUT, Auckland. She is interested in the potential for new modes of imagining bodies, their behaviors and environments, both human and non-human. She works with performance, temporal exhibition experiences, sculpture, video and photography. It is her ongoing interest to create languages merging sensibilities, materials and experiences from various fields often with non-professional participants or analyses of living matter with variable outcomes. Frankovich has held solo and two-person exhibitions at Complex Bodies, Kurator, Alte Fabrik, Gebert Stiftung für Kultur, Rapperswil, Switzerland, 2015; Today thistechnique is the other way around, Kunstverein Hildesheim, 2013; and Gestures, Splits and Annulations at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2011. Group exhibitions and performances include: Trans–corporeal Metabolisms – the 12th Performance Project of LISTE Art Fair Basel; Les Limbes, La Galerie, Noisy-le-sec, Studium Generale; If I Cant Dance I Don’t WantTo Be A Part Of Your Revolution, Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, all 2016.

Brooklyn Commons is organized by Kari Conte, ISCP Director of Programs and Exhibitions.

This program is supported, in part, by New York State Council on the Arts and New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.