Registration ends 07.4.2026 at 23:59 h

Few artists have been as consistently associated with “institutional critique” as the contemporary artist Andrea Fraser. Across her writing, performances, videos, and—more recently—sculptural works, Fraser has examined the social, affective, economic, and institutional structures that organize the art field. Drawing on extensive research, social theory—particularly the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu—and psychoanalysis (both through her experience as a patient and as an active member of the Group Relations community), she has developed a rigorous, embodied, and site-specific method of feminist critique. Adapted from one of her essays (“L’1%, c’est moi”), the title of this seminar points to the affective and psychosocial dimensions of the artist’s relationship to the institution. The institution is not a discrete external “other,” but something continually reproduced and embodied by those who identify with it. This seminar proposes a close reading—not of a single text, but of an artist’s oeuvre. We will study Fraser’s essays alongside key texts in institutional theory, view and discuss her performances, and travel to Berlin to meet and speak with some of her long-time collaborators and interlocutors. The aim is to shift the focus away from the relationship between “the artist” and “the institution” toward a scene of 1990s style institutional critique, in which Fraser figures as a central protagonist.

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