Andrea Fraser

Since the 1980s, Andrea Fraser has achieved renown for performances that interrogate social and cultural structures with humour and pathos, aligning herself with feminism and institutional critique. While her video and performance works are often associated with investigations of art institutions and the production and consumption of art, her performances since the early 2000s have demonstrated a turn toward analysing the intersection between socio-political and psychological structures as they produce individual and group identity.

Andrea Fraser’s first appearance at M HKA was in 1993, when she presented On Taking a Normal Situation… (1993), a set of ten posters created as part of an exhibition for Antwerp 93, Cultural Capital of Europe. Taking the official communication posters of the event as her starting point, she questioned art and its function in society by altering the language and visual identity of the campaign. Following this, several of her works were acquired for the museum collection. Collectively, they represent different aspects of the arts (the institution, the gallery, the collector and the artist) and different genres of mediation and speech-making as they have been consistently covered by the artist in her oeuvre through the years. M HKA recently invited Andrea Fraser to share a focus on her latest video performances, which explore the complex dynamic and potential of small-group discussions.