grazerkunstverein

(Artist Placement)

Frank Wasser

1 September - 31 December, 2026

In 1965, Barbara Steveni together with artist John Latham developed the Artist Placement Group (APG): a model that placed and embedded artists within companies, industries, government departments, giving them  an open brief to engage with their respective environments. The aim  was not necessarily to produce an object or exhibition, but to allow the artist to enter a particular context and, in doing so, potentially affect the way the organisation understood itself. The APG’s guiding proposition, “Context is half the work,” shifted attention away from the artwork as an isolated object and towards the relationships, structures, and situations, in which artistic practice takes place. It is in this spirit that, as part of Yana Foqué’s tenure, the institution is initiating an annual artist placement.

Each year, one artist will be invited to become part of the institution for an extended period, entering into its existing structures, rhythms, conversations, and working processes. The placement is conceived as a framework for moving artists from the margins  of institutional structures towards  their centre: beyond the short, intensive exhibition cycle through which artists are temporarily brought in, generate value, and leave again, while the conditions of unstable income, limited social security, and a lack of long-term support remain largely unchanged.

For its inaugural edition, we are pleased to welcome Frank Wasser (b. Dublin, Ireland), an Irish artist, writer, and educator whose practice spans performance, text, installation, sculpture, and moving image. His work develops a sustained critical inquiry into the infrastructures of institutional power, labour, and cultural production, with particular attention to the material and discursive conditions through which art is produced, circulated, and received. Through embodied performance and situated writing, Wasser examines authorship, class dynamics, pedagogy, and the structural frameworks that organise artistic labour and shape contemporary art discourse. Recent projects include Debt (Group show) at Salzburger Kunstverein, Austria (2025), and The Irish Face at the Tate Britain Library and Archive, presented in collaboration with Askeaton Contemporary Arts (2025).