Artist Bio

Vera Frenkel

verafrenkel.com

Vera Frenkel’s multidisciplinary projects, new media works and videotapes have been seen at documenta IX, Kassel; the Offenes Kulturhaus Centrum für Gegenwartskuns, Linz; the Setagaya Museum, Tokyo; the Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Mostra Grafica and the Club Media of the Biennale di Venezia; the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris; and the Georg Kargl Gallery, Vienna, among other venues.

Body Missing: From Theft to Virtuality, an international conference on her work at the ICA, London, focused on Frenkel’s 2003 exhibition at the Freud Museum, London.

Of Memory and Displacement, an acclaimed four-disk DVD/CD-ROM collection, features key artworks and writings, including those shown at Video Viewpoints, MoMA and as the featured Spotlight of the Canadian Images Festival, Toronto. The Institute™: Or, What We Do for Love, Frenkel’s ongoing project on the inner life of a dysfunctional cultural institution, received the 2004 CCCA ‘Untitled’ Art Award for best exhibition and project in cyberspace, and has been shown in a number of venues across Canada, including a special version for the National Gallery in 2006. (www.the-national-institute.org/tour)

Recipient of the 2006 Governor General’s Award for visual and Media Art, a 1989 Molson Prize, and two honorary degrees, Frenkel’s work has also been acknowledged via the Toronto Arts Award, the Gershon Iskowitz Prize and the 2000 Bell Canada Award.

She has been in demand here and abroad as visiting artist, and her writings have appeared in key art journals and anthologies, such as Museums after Modernism (Eds. Griselda Pollock, Joyce Zemans, Blackwell’s, U.K.) and Joseph Beuys; The Reader (Eds. Claudia Mesch, Viola Michely. M.I.T. Press). (A complete list of writings is available on request.)

Frenkel’s City Poem/Poem City, a video intervention commissioned by Penex-Metropolis for the Yonge-Dundas Square, Toronto video board, is now on view, and her image-text centrefold for Horsd'oeuvre, a publication of Le Magasin’s Curatorial Session 17, now amplified as a mural, has become the point of departure for Once Near Water: Notes from the Scaffolding Archive, the work in progress being shown at Akau Inc. Project Space, curated by Cheryl Sourkes. (September 19 – November 22, 2008)

Realized in part under a Charles Street Video artist-in-residency program, the final commissioned work will be premièred with live improvisation by the brilliant Continuum ensemble at the Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam in November, 2008 as part of the SHIFT Festival of the Arts.

Vera Frenkel was the keynote speaker at the 2006 DOCAM conference hosted by the Daniel Langlois Foundation in Montréal and her talk, “Rules for Letting Go” can be viewed on line.(http://www.docam.ca/en/?p=95)(1). She has accepted an invitation as artist in residence, University of Toronto, 2008-2009 and will be visiting artist at the University of Windsor next spring. The 6-channel video-web-photo installation, Body Missing, (www.yorku.ca/BodyMissing) installed from May to August in the tunnels under the city of Linz as part of the exhibition Strom des Vergessens, will be re-installed when the exhibition is remounted in the summer of 2009, to mark Linz’s role as 2009 European Cultural Capital.

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