Frank Wasser is an Irish artist, writer and curator based in London.
Wasser is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland. This website is under construction. This website will re-launch in May 2024
Current: Title, to be announced. - Steam Works (London) March 2024 (Solo Exhibition)
Upcoming: Pot Hole - University of Oxford (Oxford) March 2024 (Solo Exhibition)
SPLIT - Launch in Dublin and Vienna (Spring 2024)
Latest Criticism:
Visual Artsist Newsheet: December 2023
Latest Curation:
The Virtual Lectures (November 2023)
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 The opportunity to fully consider the devastatingly appropriate nature of this short sentence is immediately withdrawn by my line manager rumbling to me sharply through my walkie-talkie earphone that ‘reading is not permitted while guarding the work.’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.
THE GIRL WHO KILLED THE BOY WHO CRIED WOLF (PART ONE) AND (PART TWO) (2014-2016)
THE GIRL WHO KILLED THE BOY WHO CRIED WOLF is a science fiction screenplay and ongoing work that takes the form of printed material and audio installation within an expanded context. The screenplay takes place in the same universe as the 1983 film Born in Flames. The screenplay is set in a not-so distant future in the aftermath of the events that take place in the film Born in Flames (1983). Born in Flames is a 1983 documentary-style feminist science fiction film by Lizzie Borden that explores racism, classism, sexism and heterosexism in an alternative United States socialist democracy.
Image of the promotional poster for Born in Flames (1983) Lizzie Borden
Currently two parts of the screenplay have been published. Part three will be published in Autumn 2016.
Part One was also included in How To See Clearly From A Distance (2014) by Jennie Guy. The project was commissioned by Galway University Hospital as part of TULCA 2014. Artist Jennie Guy asked a selection of artists and writers to read out texts that they have written, chosen with a particular context in mind. Available online and advertised via posters in the hospital for the duration of TULCA 2014, these voices offered a series of narratives that stray between the mundane and the imaginary, simultaneously distant and intimately present.Contributing artists and writers included: Hu Fang, Fergal Gaynor, Jennie Guy, Russell Hart, Léa Lagasse, Tamarin Norwood, Leila Peacock, Alan Phelan and Frank Wasser. You can listen to a reading of this part by visiting the following page: https://soundcloud.com/howtoseeclearly
PART ONE
Part One was published as paart of an artist book published on the occasion of Jason Dunne's Emerging Artist Award Exhibition at Siamsa Tire Gallery, Tralee, Co.Kerry, Ireland.
An Egg in the Sky by Jason Dunne
Published by Siamsa Tire Gallery (2013)
107 Pages, 14.5 x 20cm, Soft cover,
Edition of 100
Contents:
Drawings by Jason Dunne
'An Egg in the Sky' by Jason Dunne
'The Girl Who Killed the Boy Who Cried Wolf', a screenplay by Frank Wasser
'My Fathers', an excerpt from a theatrical script by Joseph Noonan-Ganley
Designed by Studio Hato with Ai-Lun Huang
PART TWO
PART TWO of the screenplay was published as part of the second issue of Paperwork magazine.
http://www.paperworkmagazine.com
PaperWork is a self published art writing print and event magazine. It is organised by Sarah Charalambides, Jessa Mockridge and Catherine Smiles.
PaperWork is designed by Stinsensqueeze, and printed by Two Press.
Contact at paperworkmagazine@gmail.com
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