Lecture in English with simultaneous translation into Polish

Join us for a performative lecture by Andrea Fraser, accompanying her solo exhibition at Zachęta. The artist will talk about the contexts in which her works presented in the exhibition were created, her methods rooted in feminist studies of subjectivity, but also look at our expectations of art.

Andrea Fraser is one of the most important contemporary art figures working on institutional critique, the role of the artist and the power structures, hierarchies and mechanisms of the art market. Her work as an artist, but also as an author of texts and publications, plays a unique role in defining the mechanisms of power and the ‘production of wealth’ in the field of contemporary art. For more than three decades, she has been investigating the social, financial and affective economy of cultural organisations, groups and individuals. The artistic strategies she consistently uses in her work are linked to Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of culture, psychoanalysis, but also ideas of pluralism and democracy. In her publications, which form an integral part of her artistic practice - a cultural resistance with not so much a political dimension as an ethical one - she explores themes of cultural value sustained by museum institutions, the role of the artist as a provider of goods and services in a commercialised art world, and the contribution of the cultural sector to the maintenance of racism and social inequality. A rare self-reflection on her own role as an artist is evident in her work, and the strategies she uses - performative interventions, critical-polemical speeches, dialogues and monologues - add up to a broad and critical description of the existing art world system and inspire social debate.