Alicia Frankovich
Brunswick Baths
Feature image description: In a pool of water, a clothed person floats. Their torso and legs are beneath the water, their arms are raised above, their hands gesturing, like a form of sign language. The surface of the water is dappled with light and shade, like the shimmery scales of a fish. [Other image descriptions embedded in alt text.]
The Eye
📍 Brunswick Baths
was she dipped in paint. split open like achilles. where was she weak? she looked at her body and saw only pores, only wet spaces, vessel, opening. she was whole. was she. born or made. was she possible? she looked at her fingertips for a seam. pinched her skin in case it was all a dream. was she real?
— Alexis Pauline Gumbs
At the Brunswick Baths, Alicia Frankovich presents The Eye (2022), a live performance sited at the main indoor pool. The rectangular 20-metre heated pool becomes like a stage or gallery space around which the audience gathers in expectation of a performance to unfold. But while the pool may share some attributes of those more usual suspects for performance, it is an entirely different animal. The Baths have a different function, but also a different sociability, and a different relationship to bodies – both our body, and the bodies of others. This charged atmosphere sets into motion conditions for performance other than a gallery. Frankovich is keen to engage the pleasures and tensions of the boundary between being in or out of the water, and transgressing it. Indeed, transitions and transformations, and how we might collectively experience them, are ongoing interests of the artist. The audience, filing in from a cold winter’s night, entering the steamy Baths and surrounding the pool, will experience another transition, one that is multi-sensorial and calls attention to their own bodies, dressed for winter, standing around a pool, waiting for something to happen.
Frankovich’s work, which comprises video, photography, installation and sculpture, as well as performance, often toggles between the micro and the macro, between body and planet. Recent work, including The Eye, proceeds from climate crisis as a given condition of contemporary life. Frankovich uses the pool environment to imagine, in her words, ‘rising waters, the body and the elements in a conglomerate space where everyone is enveloped in the situation’. This situation will involve performers, some of whom are regulars at the Baths, dialogue, silence, coloured light and darkness. The work will not be morbid, or moralising. Inspired by philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s theory of ‘affirmative critique’, Frankovich is interested in something more dialectical, more human, and more interesting. Her purpose is ‘to articulate the political strategy of this work and the way it uses beauty and the warmth of social bonds between performers and audience members to complicate the horror of dominant representations of climate disaster’.—TM
References
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 15.
Email to the author, 15 March 2022.
Alicia Frankovich, “Choreography of Climate Disaster as Affirmative Critique,” (unpublished manuscript, 22 February 2022), 1.
Image Description: The phrase ‘I ENTER THROUGH THE MOUTH’ is shaped from a typeface in which the alphabet melts away as the letters progress from A to Z, a performative echo of gradual icecap loss amid global warming. The letters are solid black, with curving edges at the extremities as the letterforms disappear. Typography designed by Kin Pan Lo.
Audio production by Simon Maisch. Supported by SIAL Sound Studios, School of Design, RMIT University
The following text has been commissioned to reflect upon and respond to Alicia Frankovich, The Eye at Brunswick Baths. The text is intended as a form of experimental wayfinding when engaging with the work.
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I enter through the mouth
And pass over a few coins to the teller, warmed
by the heat of my hands.
Down a chrome-lined ramp to a narrow corridor, propelled forward, I rush towards muffled shouts and the gushing of water in constant circulation.
Outside the changing room, I pass by a pair of children waiting for their caregiver. The sweet
smell of shampoo. They are chanting
Old man dead, old man dead, old man dead,
in synchrony, hands clapping against handsIn the belly of the building
I am enveloped by heat, moisture, movement,
and noise
The hot air is pregnant with water and chlorine,
and echoes of the loud static of water rushing through grates and filters.
The acidic sting of the chlorine is in my eyes
and nose and catches at the back of my throat.Blue is everywhere
Blue water, blue tiles, blue pool covers, blue pool noodles, blue boards for learning how to swim
Red is a warning
A red LED sign of the time and temperature, red warnings; don’t run, don’t dive, shallow water,
And the fast-moving red hand of the clock
Yellow observes
Yellow lifeguards pace up and down, yellow life boards hang above the pool, watching and waitingClothes and shoes, bags piled up on benches, chairs around the perimeter
A few bored people sit and wait, they watch
Walking through the space I feel exposed
Spandex stretched tightly over my flesh offers little disguise,
I move quickly
The hurried slapping of my bare feet against wet concrete betrays my haste
To the waterI grip the silver railing, slide into cool water,
where breath comes in short gasps as I adjust to the change in temperature
There is both a feeling of weightlessness,
And an awareness of each movement that occurs when the body is exposed to gentle resistance.
The water holds me, eases the pain in my back and my jointsWhat is it to be immersed in a body of water with others?
My body registers the currents created by the bodies around me, and sensation connects us
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Alicia Frankovich was born in Tauranga, Aotearoa, and lives and works in Naarm Melbourne. Frankovich is interested in the potential for modes of imagining bodies, their behaviours and environments, both human and non-human, as well as questioning whole subject or whole Earth. She has held exhibitions and performances including Atlas of Anti-Taxonomies, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū; AQI2020, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki; The Work, Kaldor Public Art Projects, Sydney; Atlas of the Living World, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; After Blue Marble, KUB Billboards, KunsthausBregenz; and OUTSIDE BEFORE BEYOND, Kunstvereinfür die Reinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf.
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Erin Hallyburton is an artist and researcher who lives and works in Naarm Melbourne. Her sculptural practice engages with fat studies and intersectional theory in order to examine the conceptual and material limits of the body, and how these limits manifest in certain sites. Edible and transforming materials enact ongoing processes with the gallery space, highlighting the viscosity of architectural and hierarchal structures that are presented as neutral and static.
Hallyburton’s work has been exhibited in galleries across Australia and she is currently completing her Master of Fine Art candidature at Monash University. In 2022, she won the prestigious Schenberg Art Fellowship.