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Frank Wasser

Frank Wasser is an artist and writer currently studying for his doctoral degree in Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art and St. Cross College, University of Oxford.

What voice is it that you think you can hear in your head right now? Is it the voice of a student? This student? Perhaps it is your own voice? Perhaps you do not own your voice? Perhaps, the voice is that of the multitude of various entangled institutions and conventions you must knowingly or unknowingly navigate, weave under and over, around and through in order to even comprehend that which you are reading, this text.

Wasser’s practice led research currently cumulates within a performance of student-hood through an art writing practice both on and off page within the context of the art school, the wider university and the neoliberal structures of contemporary art education. This performance unfolds through a variety of materials, forms and encounters both discrete and explicit, taking the form of the body of an artist, lecture-performance, sculptures, publications, songs and slips of the tongue.

Currently Wasser’s research is focused on a fractured but subjective critical voice. Recorded sound-pieces and tangled text form the basis of an investigative preoccupation with class, colonialism and the contemporary and historical formal structures that govern and determine what currently constitutes as an art education. Subjects such as the ghost of Brendan Behan and an anthropomorphised government report (The Coldstream Report) are called upon.

Originally from the Liberties, Dublin, Ireland, Wasser holds a BA in Painting and an MFA in Sculpture from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland. Wasser has exhibited and lectured internationally: most recently at Jerwood Arts (London) Tate Modern and Tate Britain (London) Villa Empain (Brussels) Damian and the Love Guru (Brussels)  Baltic Centre of Contemporary Art (Newcastle) In December 2020 he will publish a book with the imprint MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE. Wasser was the recipient of the Inger Lawrence Award (2019)  and the Art Council Ireland Visual Artist Bursary (2018) Wasser has been an invited visiting tutor at the Royal College of Art and University of Reading.