The 2017 Ingeborg Bachmann Fellowship, established by Anselm Kiefer, is awarded to the artist Yael Frank for her incisive critique and her ability to challenge the social infrastructure that often politicizes death, validating the mechanisms of power and policing historical narratives through the socialization of data.
Yael Frank (born 1982), is a multidisciplinary creator working in video, installation, sound, sculpture, and the creation of immersive environments. Her works engage visitors in situations characterized by disruptions, interruptions, and unresolved distortions. Through these techniques of subversion, Frank’s work reveals the politics embedded in power structures, systems of knowledge, and historical narratives, often leading to uncertainty and exposing the contradictions inherent in existence. This casting of doubt undermines the strong convictions and beliefs that underpin systems of knowledge dissemination and the establishment of cultural, social, gender, and economic canons.
Frank’s work oscillates between cynical realism and a sarcastic post-irony that deconstructs taboo subjects and fearlessly delivers sharp critiques of human existence and the socialization of the culture of death. This culture often serves to reinforce the significant, yet implied, values of societies. For instance, in The Monuments of Monuments (2014), Frank uses the sanctity of death, as depicted in Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, as a compositional framework. Here, eleven colossal pink fingers emerge from a wooden surface, replacing the drowning heroes of the colonialist raft en route to Mauritania on July 2, 1816. In another work, the karaoke machine SING ALONG (2013), Frank blends unsettling humor and historical critique: the machine produces “bad luck” as ghostly figures appear behind a screen, accompanied by Chopin’s Funeral March. This march, originally played at the composer’s burial on October 30, 1849, was later adapted as a military march for John F. Kennedy’s funeral on November 25, 1963. A superstitious belief arose that performing the march could lead to the death of loved ones. Frank uses these “problems,” as she calls them, to illuminate the ways beliefs and knowledge shape human experiences of life and death.
In her work Problem (2016–2017), Frank intensifies this critique by presenting medical machines that narrate empty emotional politics and banal catastrophes, displayed in an orderly and sterile glass case.