Alicia Frankovich
(b. 1980, Tauranga, New Zealand. Lives and works in Melbourne)

Born in Aotearoa/New Zealand and currently based in Naarm/Melbourne, Alicia Frankovich is an artist working across sculpture, performance, video, photography and the format of the exhibition itself. Her work engages living human and non-human entities to reveal the limits of how we understand notions of nature.

For Melbourne Now, Frankovich presents a new live work that explores our current climate emergency from queer and wild perspectives. Rich in World/Poor in World comprises scenes that describe our current experience, suggesting possible futures while engaging with our present, through utopian and dystopian affect. In her choreographies, difference is celebrated using movement and gesture with a corps of both trained and untrained dancers. The work moves from a contemporary re-imagining of Noah’s Ark to a toddler’s play area, to a stampede, crowd or swarm. Through Rich in World/Poor in World we experience the artist’s speculations, and the possibilities – and impossibilities – of maintaining human life here on Earth.

Frankovich holds a PhD from Monash University (2022). She has been the recipient of the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship and the Australian Postgraduate Award Scholarship at Monash University. She has presented numerous solo exhibitions and performance commissions, including The Eye, Brunswick Baths, Open House Melbourne, and Atlas of Anti-Taxonomies, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū (2022); AQI2020, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki (2020); The Work, Kaldor Projects, AGNSW, Sydney (2019); After Blue Marble, KUB Billboards, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2018); and Exoplanets, MUMA, Melbourne, Atlas of the Living World, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and OUTSIDE BEFORE BEYOND, Kunstverein für die Reinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2017). Her notable group shows include Endless Circulation and the TarraWarra Biennial (2016); Complex Bodies (with Klara Lidén), Gebert Stiftung für Kultur, Rapperswil (2015); Framed Movements, ACCA, Melbourne and The 12th Swiss Sculpture Exhibition: Le Mouvement: Performing the City, Biel/Bienne (2014); Nouvelles Vagues: The Real Thing? Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013); Dublin Contemporary (2011); Auckland Triennial (2010); and the Busan Biennial (2006).

Rich in World/Poor in World appeared in Community Hall on 1–22 Apr 2023.

Performers
LJ Connolly-Hiatt
Mara Galagher
Shelley Lasica
Shian Law
Enzo Nazario
Erin O’Rourke
Lana Šprajcer
Angelita Biscotti
Jesse Gall
Erin Hallyburton
Alexis Kanatsios
Daniel R Marks
Rajdeep Puri

Musical composition
Igor Klaczyński