On July 26th, Tehching Hsieh and Alicia Frankovich will discuss their work, time and the body in performance.

Tehching Hsieh was born on December 31, 1950 in Nan-Chou, Taiwan. Hsieh dropped out of high school in 1967 and took up painting. After finishing his compulsory military service, Hsieh had his first solo show at the gallery of the American News Bureau in Taiwan. Shortly after this solo show, Hsieh stopped painting. He made a performance action, Jump Piece, in which he broke both of his ankles. He trained as a seaman, which he then used as a means to enter the United States. In July 1974, Hsieh finally arrived at a small port near Philadelphia. He was an illegal immigrant in the States for fourteen years until he was granted amnesty in 1988. Starting in the late 1970s, Hsieh made five One Year Performances and a “Thirteen Year Plan,” inside and outside his studio in New York City. Using long durations, Hsieh made his art and life simultaneous. The first four One Year Performances attracted significant attention in New York; the last two pieces, intentionally retreating from the art world, set a tone of sustained invisibility. Since 2000, released from the restriction of not showing his work during a thirteen-year period, Hsieh has exhibited around the world. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Alicia Frankovich was born in 1980 in Tauranga, New Zealand, and lives and works in Berlin. Frankovich holds an MFA from Monash University, Melbourne, and completed a BVA in sculpture at the Auckland University of Technology. She is interested in new ways to imagine bodies, their behaviors and environments, both human and non-human. She works with performance, temporal exhibition experiences, sculpture, video and photography. It is her ongoing interest to create languages that merge sensibilities, materials and experiences from various fields, working with non-professional participants, and analyses of living matter, with variable outcomes. Frankovich has held solo and two-person exhibitions including Complex Bodies, Gebert Stiftung für Kultur, Rapperswil, Switzerland, 2015; Today this technique is the other way around, Kunstverein Hildesheim, 2013; and Gestures, Splits and Annulations at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2011. Her group exhibitions and performances include: Trans–corporeal Metabolisms – the 12th Performance Project, LISTE Art Fair Basel; Les Limbes, La Galerie, Noisy-le-sec, Studium Generale; If I Cant Dance I Don’t Want To Be A Part Of Your Revolution, Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, all 2016.

Brooklyn Commons is organized by Kari Conte, ISCP Director of Programs and Exhibitions.

This program is supported, in part, by New York State Council on the Arts and New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.