Marian Goodman Gallery New York announces an inaugural exhibition with Andrea Fraser, which will be on view from 12 January through 25 February 2023.  This exhibition presents a small survey of Fraser’s work from the late 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, as well as the New York premiere of a new video installation.  

Andrea Fraser is widely recognized as one of the most radical voices of institutional critique. Her work deploys rigorous conceptual analysis, humor, and pathos to question the social, economic, and political systems embedded within cultural institutions and practices, exposing our entanglements and implicit participation within these systems. 

The six works on view in the current exhibition represent a selection from four decades of work that highlights Fraser’s provocative and self-reflexive approach to examining national, cultural, and social identity.

In the North Gallery and North Viewing Room four works dating from 1989 to 2003 introduce a dialogue between the mediums of performance, video, photography, text, and sculpture. These works demonstrate the range of Fraser’s long standing engagement with the critique of cultural experience economies, from global tourism to international survey exhibitions, to, most famously, museum tours. In these, Fraser examines the relationship between racism, colonialism, nationalism, and cultural appropriation.

In the South gallery, the New York premiere of Fraser’s recent This meeting is being recorded, 2021, will be shown: a ninety-nine-minute performance-based video installation that examines race, gender, and age in an intergenerational group of seven white women, including Fraser herself.  Based on transcripts of six ninety-minute discussions organized by Fraser in 2020, the women apply psychoanalytic group relations methods to the task of examining their internal racism and their roles in white supremacy.  In the process, they must work through their anxieties, vulnerabilities, hatreds, and longings. Fraser embodies all seven women — their individual personas, verbal intonations, and mannerisms —  in a tour-de-force performance recorded in a single shot. Performed directly to the camera, the work pulls the viewer into the complex dynamics of projection, identification, and othering as it excavates the unconscious and emotional underpinnings of racism and racialization in white women. 

Accompanying this video installation, Fraser presents a new work, This meeting is being recorded: Rehearsal script draft 11, table 8, 2021/2022, which extends her long history of data- and text-based works, and her deep connection to the traditions of Conceptual art practice. In tables and text installed along an adjacent wall, the work lays out the content of the video in clinical detail, revealing the objectification and analysis involved in the process of its making, providing a counterpoint to the empathic and emotional pull of the performance.

The opening reception for the artist will take place on Thursday, 12th January, from 6-8 pm.

For further information please visit  mariangoodman.com

@mariangoodmangallery