ALICIA FRAMIS
LEAVE HERE YOUR FEARS

KÖNIG BERLIN
24 MARCH – 22 APRIL 2023

KÖNIG GALERIE is pleased to present its first exhibition with Spanish artist, Alicia Framis. Based in Amsterdam, Framis has garnered attention and accolades for her participatory, performative interventions into a variety of contexts. For LEAVE HERE YOUR FEARS, Framis has constructed a mirrored steel sculpture that will occupy the center point of the Chapel at St. Agnes in Berlin. This durational, interactive show involves two distinct moments, both anchored to the reflective object at its core. The first involves Framis’ invitation to viewers to write down their greatest fears and troubling thoughts and deposit them into a small opening on the sculpture’s mirrored surface. Once collected, the second moment involves Framis’ act of removing the anonymous missives and transferring them to stretched sections of canvas that will then cover the chapel walls, creating an installation that takes shape over the course of the exhibition’s run.

Framis is an artist whose work is defined by the specific contexts in which it dwells, often using participation and social praxis to highlight systemic issues within the larger world that exists beyond the exhibition environment, but which nevertheless plays an important role in shaping it. The porous boundaries between individuals and artworks are vital to Framis’ work, as is the relationship between subjects and the organizational structures that influence their thoughts and behavior. In LEAVE HERE YOUR FEARS, Framis instantiates a kind of occasion for interaction with her audience, allowing individual visitors to externalize and concretize their deepest fears and deposit them in the hopes that they will be transformed into paintings that give form to the exhibition; more than participating, visitors effectively become co-creators alongside Framis.

The impetus behind LEAVE HERE YOUR FEARS was, in part, the growth of anxiety and root fear nowadays. Framis does not propose that this introspective period be somehow erased. On the contrary, there is a generosity in Framis’ appeal to record and share each individual’s own fears, giving space to those feelings while also using them as source material for further construction, inciting a mobility of thoughts and trepidations, bearing witness to their recoding, as simply something else. This is a mode of artmaking that is at once deeply personal and simultaneously profoundly social, a process of providing an occasion for those two spheres to meld in productive and restorative tension with one another.

EXHIBITED WORKS

MY FAITH

Alicia Framis

MY FAITH

BEING FORGOTTEN

Alicia Framis

BEING FORGOTTEN

LONGING

Alicia Framis

LONGING

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FEATURED ARTIST

ALICIA FRAMIS


Alicia Framis (b. 1967 in Barcelona, Spain) lives and works in Amsterdam. She received an MFA from the Rijksakademie of Fine Arts in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and the Institut Hautes Études in Paris, France, and was most recently awarded a PhD from the University Complutense of Fine Arts in Madrid, Spain, in 2022. Framis works at the intersection of social practice and participation. The performative element of her engagements has taken form variously as workshops, installations, videos, and live actions. Her pioneering work in these fields over the last three decades was first motivated by the desire to reach disaffected communities in ...
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