Franke Ivana
Membership in Academy:
- associate member – Department of Fine Arts (05/16/2024 – …)
Curriculum Vitae
Ivana Franke is a visual artist (b. 1973, Zagreb). Franke graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb in 1997. She participated in a postgraduate research program at the Center for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu (CCA Kitakyushu), Japan in 2001/2002.
She has held several artist residencies, including at the P.S.1 Center for Contemporary Art (MoMa P.S.1) in New York in 2001 and at the Nordic Institute of Contemporary Art (NIFCA) in Helsinki in 2004. In 2009/2010, she was fellow of the Institute for Spatial Research at the University of the Arts, Berlin (Institut für Raumexperimente, UdK).
In 2024, she became associate member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Franke’s spatial and light installations, sculptures and drawings often employ complex geometric structures, transparent materials and reflected light to produce apparently ephemeral phenomena at the limits of our perception, drawing attention to the empty and the invisible.
Her practice explores the relationships between perceptual and cognitive processes, external reality and social constructions, drawing on knowledge from a range of disciplines including neuroscience, perceptual psychology, mathematics, optics, and architecture.
Franke represented Croatia at the 52nd Venice Biennale with the exhibition Latency in Area Scarpa, Palazzo Querini Stampalia in 2007. Other solo exhibitions include Twilight. Neither perception nor non-perception, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, 2022; Apperception, Lauba, 2022; Limits of Perception Lab. Your Country of Two Dimensions is Not Spacious Enough at Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, 2020; Perceptual Drift (Galaxies in Mind), Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, 2017; Retreat into Darkness. Towards a Phenomenology of the Unknown at the Schering Foundation Project Space, Berlin, 2017; and Lability, Art Pavilion, Zagreb, 2009.
She participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the 9th Venice Architecture Biennale (2004); Manifesta 7, European Biennial of Contemporary Art (2008); the 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016); the 7th Yokohama Triennale (2020); the 4th Hangzhou Triennial (2022); and at institutions such as Kunsthalle Barmen, Wuppertal (2024); Espacio Fundación Telefónica, Madrid (2022); Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka (2020); MACBA, Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona (2018); Palazzo Esposizioni, Rome (2018); Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2017); Deichtorhallen, Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art in Wroclaw (2015); Halle 14 Center for Contemporary Art in Leipzig (2015); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2014); Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah (2013); Museum of Old and New Art, MONA in Hobart, Tasmania (2013); among many others.
Within her projects: Seeing with Eyes Closed and Towards a Phenomenology of the Unknown, she collaborated with neuroscientist Ida Momennejad and psychologist Bilge Sayim, and initiated interdisciplinary symposiums and panel discussions at Savvy Contemporary (2020), Silent Green (2017), Deutsche Guggenheim (2012) in Berlin, and Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice (2011), among others. She furthermore exhibited her installations at scientific conferences, including the European Conference of Visual Perception in Liverpool (2015) and the Science of Consciousness Conference in Tucson (2016), Arizona.
She realized a number of temporary public installations including Rezonanca nepredviđenog, installed around the Music Pavilion in Zrinjevac Square in Zagreb in 2023, the first iteration of the work Resonance of the Unforeseen, set over the long facade of the Yokohama Museum of Art in 2020, and Time Slip (in collaboration with Tommi Gronlund and Petteri Nisunen), installed in Titov trg in Rijeka as a part of the European Capital of Culture 2020 project in 2019/2020. Her permanent installations include Frameworks (in collaboration with P. Mišković, L. Pelivan and T. Plejić), the Croatian Pavilion at the 9th Venice Architecture Biennale – afterwards permanently installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Room for Running Ghosts in Rovinj, and Echoes of the Light Second in Nansha, Guaghzhou.
Franke is recipient of several awards, including the Josip Račić Award for the exhibition Lability at the Art Pavilion in Zagreb (2010); the Grand Prix of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts at the 7th Croatian Prints Triennial (2016) and the 3rd Croatian Prints Triennial (2003), and the Prize of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia at the 2nd Croatian Prints Triennial (2000) organized by the Department of Prints and Drawings of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts; and the Croatian Association of Fine Artists Award for Young Artist (2000).
She has held a number of lectures, workshops and seminars at the Institut für Architekturbezogene Kunst IAK, TU Braunschweig, 2014–2015; the University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Hochschule Bielefeld (HSBI), 2024; the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy (ENSAPC), Paris, 2023; the Center for Innovative Media, Academy of Applied Arts (CIM APURI), Rijeka University, 2019; and the Ambedkar University, Delhi, 2014. Franke participated in interdisciplinary symposia such as Borderlands: Art and Neuroscience in Dialogue, Roter Salon, Volksbühne Berlin, 2018.