Frank Wasser is a contemporary Irish artist, writer, and educator whose practice spans performance, installation, text, and critical theory, engaging deeply with issues of institutional power, authorship, and the politics of art production. His work is characterized by its conceptual rigor and critical approach, often interrogating the role of art institutions and the frameworks that shape contemporary artistic discourse. Wasser has collaborated with, exhibited at, and worked within several leading institutions across Europe, including Tate Modern, the Royal College of Art, University of the Arts London, and IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art). These collaborations serve as both the subject and context for his ongoing exploration of how cultural institutions shape knowledge, value, and artistic identity.
Wasser’s engagement with pedagogy, both as an educator and within his artistic practice, further complicates his critique of institutional power. Drawing from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Wasser approaches education as a dialogic process, questioning the hierarchical transmission of knowledge within academic and artistic settings. His performative lectures, often staged in institutional contexts, blur the boundaries between teacher and student, artist and audience, turning the pedagogical encounter into a site of critical engagement and collective inquiry.
As a writer and critic, Wasser extends his artistic critique into the realm of art theory and criticism, frequently contributing to discourses on the politics of art, the role of the artist, and the function of art institutions in neoliberal society. His writing reflects an acute awareness of the ways in which contemporary art is enmeshed in larger socio-political and economic structures, critiquing the complicity of art institutions in perpetuating capitalist ideologies and market-driven imperatives.
This website is currently under construction. For a full portfolio and full CV, please email Francis.wasser@gmail.com
Upcoming: Askeaton Contemporary: https://askeatonarts.com/current/
Latest Criticism:
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Visual Artsist Newsheet: December 2023
Latest Curation:
Crit with Jasmine Johnson, Liam Gillick and Cem A.
Wasser is Lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, London Metropolitan University and a D.Phil candidate at University of Oxford.
SPLIT (ZER0-HOUR FRAGMENTS) - A book by Frank Wasser
Available September 19th 2023 from https://mabibliotheque.cargo.site/THE-CONSTELLATIONS
Slowly turning the first page of a book stolen from the museum gift shop, I read this quotation from Marina Vishmidt set in italics in the centre of the page: ‘Anything that is not work can be art’. The opportunity to fully consider the devastatingly appropriate nature of this short sentence is immediately withdrawn by my line manager rumbling to me sharply through my walkie-talkie earphone that ‘reading is not permitted while guarding the work.’
This series of distractions collates the sparse written fragments of a zero-hour contractor and associate lecturer seeking agency through the acts of writing and making. Initially it was written on a smart phone between 2013 and 2018, while the writer (the worker) worked zero-hour contract jobs in universities, museums, and art institutions in London. The nameless protagonist is only named by the many name badges he is obliged to wear. SPLIT is a tapestry of observations, fictions, and confabulations from inside the institutions sustaining, controlling, and propagating the flow of capital and culture through living bodies. Each fragment charts the deterioration of the worker through industrial action, toward illness, debt, and inevitable death.
‘Like with a game of Exquisite Corpse, the further you get into the narrative sequence the more its subject disassembles. Chopped up by standard ugly work relations at every art institution going, our Fraser/Zero hero temp ricochets between description and seismographic pathos. Do you, or I, remember the worldlessness of this constant scramble from your/my days on the circuit? Maybe reading this will feel like a sleep paralysis, like being precarised into literal pieces.’
- Marina Vishmidt
Loading Bay is a webpage for writing by artists, an online dock – a space of exchange. Curated by Frank Wasser, the commissions collectively convey the materiality of language by teasing out a deft register of content and forms.
The title of this project positions an online analogue of the National Sculpture Factory’s loading bay. Loading bays are commonly encountered in factories, commercial units and industrial structures. Functioning as integral parts of a facility, they serve the purpose of providing entry points to staging areas, sites of production, storage rooms, and in this instance, art works.
These commissions offer artists the space to consider and act upon the implications of writing as a sculptural form. The inaugural artists Joseph Noonan-Ganley and Francis Whorrall-Campbell are followed by commissions by Oisín Byrne, Kelly Lloyd and Frank Wasser in June 2023.
Loading Bay is accompanied by an exhibition and live event running at the National Sculpture Factory from June 23rd – June 24th 2023. Opening reception: June 23rd 18:00, followed by live performances and launch party at 21:30.
You can view/download the commissions by clicking here.
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All content © Frank Wasser 2024 Website designed by Frank Wasser. Images by Frank Wasser, Bob Birknell Knight and Hydar Dewachi (Jerwood Arts) 2018/2019
