Regina Frank

Regina Frank is a German artist mainly working with text and textile installation and performance.

Regina Frank, born in 1965, is the daughter of Elisabeth Frank and Franz Josef Frank, and grew up in a small town in Germany, in Meßkirch, where she kept a base 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 ventured 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.

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.

Most times when asked for her contact she gave her card which was deprived of all information except “The Artist is Present” or Regina Frank “The Artist is Present” in the early 90s.

As this was long before search engines the card was useless to get in touch with her.

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.

Regina Frank has been exhibiting her installations under the title “The Artist is Present” internationally in windows, museums and public spaces.

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.

She was a founding member of the student organization Interflugs, which represented the students interests to the administration and to professors, and gave access to at the time advanced technological equipment, such as computers, video projectors, editing equipment and video cameras.

Together with her fellow students, she advocated equal rights and demanded a higher share of women as female professors 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.

She supported various forms of demonstrations in public space for equality, integration of foreigners and acceptance of homosexuals and collected funds for various social purposes.

(ShoeshineWoman, Condom and Toy- vending machines in Clubs, See you do not look, The Artist Is Present).

"The Artist Is Present" was seen in the political-social sense as presence and response-ability of the artist.

For more than a decade she was accompanied by Fernando Pessoa’s “The Book of Disquiet”, introducing him as her soulmate, many times reserving a space next to her for him.

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.

Though her whole appearance delivered material for performances, it was not until she personally met John Cage in 1990 and organized a workshop for him at the University of Art that she discovered the power and potential of performance to integrate in her own artwork.

She played chess with him and documented the game as a “photographic artpiece”.

Shortly after she organized another workshop for Marina Abramović and later an exhibition with her classmates during Marina’s guest professorship at the University of Art, Berlin.

Consequently, she was invited to participate in many museum exhibitions with her performance installations, which kept her collages, drawings and paintings largely unknown.

On her first day she earned $17.10 an hour for Norway, decreasing to 20 cents (the average cost for a worker in Indonesia in 1992 according to apparel data. Her decreasing wages were published in the Dow Jones stock index. She bought flowers and bread, symbolically as food for body and soul, and to reveal the purchasing power of her wages. The installation, which was produced during this performance, was sold to Robert J. Shiffler's collection through auction at Christies. A part of the proceeds went to a foundation that worked for the rights of illegally entrenched textile workers, who were held, like slaves, in small factories in New York 's sweatshops around the corner of the museum. The work was extensively discussed. In addition to some TV portraits, articles in Parade Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan and Vogue appeared.

L’Adieu Pearls before Gods (1993) dealt with human rights issues and global labor division.

With a 28-day performance in the window of the New Museum of Contemporary Art she drew attention to the global underpayment in the textile industry.

While she embroidered pearls on a white silk dress, she received a different hourly wage every day, calculated by the average wage of 28 different countries, paid by Westminster Bank.

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.

Her first book “The Artist is Present” 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.

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 USA, Portugal, Finland, France, Holland and China and 2018 at the MAAT (Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology) in Lisbon.

Franks 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.

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.

Regina 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.