Franko B

"As always, I am not interested in just telling my story. I tap and share the story told and untold of our humanity, which I live through witnessing these present times—for I’m here, in this space, and not alone. This performance is a journey through personal and collective memories and history. The body and the artist’s body become a canvas, a sculpture, poetry, and a sound, too"

I'm Thinking of You presents a surreal, dreamlike image... a romantic vision of childhood fantasy and abandon. The body is central, but we are also presented with objects and music, which converge to take the viewer through a contemplative, personal experience. The first inspiration for I'm Thinking of You came from a childhood object, which Franko B made into a sculpture, altered for safe use by adults. The idea was to allow adults to play, to forget their problems, to let go, or just to have fun - in the same way that children are allowed to. Over time, and with engagement with the composer, Helen Ottaway, the idea has developed and changed, with Franko using performance and music as a means to create his desired image.

"Hi, I'll tell it in English. It was a moment one freezing afternoon, left, wandering… wandering on the beach. There were a lot of people, There were people, dogs, children. I noticed this figure that from behind looked like a director, it seemed that in front of the waves, he had an orchestra, and organised and directed these waves. The sea wasn't that rough, but maybe that's how he saw it. And he had no one, he was pretty isolated, self-isolated. Inside this… He didn't talk. He directed. And I even came close before I made the film, and it was just, it's as if he saw something, He was directing. Yet, To me, he moved me, He touched me, seeing him. And then the text came to me. I didn't even have to write the text, I told it and then copied it, Yes, yes. I never wrote it watching the video after, a few days later, I improvised." Franko B.

Using innovative body mapping techniques of a film made up of thousands of found images, Franko B revisits his seminal bloodletting works for the first time in his practice. Each cut challenging the audience to confront their own history, a global history of war, abandonment, homophobia, freedom, displacement, famine and sex. In I’m Here, present but disembodied, Franko B provides a portrait of our failing society. As the artist bleeds for a world that is hemorrhaging to death, pain and nostalgia emit to expose how Franko B became who he is amongst all of the shit. “Every day I’m trying to make sense of my extended time here. The past is part of our present. It never left us but is evolving rather than repeating; it is continuing to allow us to make the same mistakes. I believe this is valid for both the personal and the political. I'm Here is trying to express these two connected worlds. It doesn’t revisit the past romantically or melancholically in the context of our political and social histories but questions and reinterprets it.” – Franko B

UNLOVED - a one-off performance at Rua Red. The performance, featuring the works from the series Homage to the New World Order, 2017, manifests the artist’s violent resistance against institutional abuse and negligence.

Love, insignificant, this, insignificant, body, insignificant, powerless, insignificant, never, insignificant, democracy, insignificant, pain, insignificant, life, insignificant, shit, insignificant, fuck, insignificant, artist, insignificant, I, insignificant, mediocracy, insignificant, deleted, insignificant, self, insignificant… – Franko B Milk & Blood is a performance held by Franko B on July 27, 2015, at Toynbee Studios (London). It appropriates the aesthetics of boxing for 32 minutes, rounds of mental and physical endurance during which Franko explores themes of pain, eroticism, revulsion, ecstasy and masculinity. The performance becomes a metaphor for social struggle and the ability to overcome it. Internationally recognised as a pioneering performance artist, Franko B uses both his body and a punching bag as democratic tools, embodying notions of the personal, political and poetic. In this unprecedented performance, Franko B returns to the seminal aesthetics of the wound. Milk will bleed. He says: “Looking introspectively, I can truly say that I have successfully wrecked my career as a ‘bleeding’ artist and continued my lust for life thanks to language.”

Franko B presents the multi-disciplinary live performance, Because of Love: volume 1. The piece represents a major departure in Franko’s practice, moving away from the gallery based tableaux vivants of his previous work. Drawing upon memories of vivid moments and experiences of art, film and dance from different stages in his life, this piece is about life, childhood, humanity, inhumanity, love and grief. Intimate connections are made between personal memories and lived experiences... experiences that can be mediated by someone else’s voice or art form, or appropriated to become one’s own in a way which is both personal and political.

In a provocative and stark portrait of the existential self, Franko B uses his own drawn blood as a symbol of carnal reality and suggests the natural destitution of the body as a fundamental of existence. Standing before us a mute body-object, achromatic and cadaverous, his performance is an act of cleansing, stripping the flesh of identity.