Vera Frenkel is a multidisciplinary artist whose videotapes, installations, performances and new media projects address the forces at work in human migration, the learning and unlearning of cultural memory, and the related bureaucratization of experience. Treating these themes in relation to the art theft practices of the Third Reich, Frenkel is currently preparing an exhibition of her Body Missing Project (http://www.yorku.ca/BodyMissing) for the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna.

Following a major exhibition mounted by the National Gallery of Canada in 1996, a retrospective of Frenkel's time-based and new media works formed the 'Spotlight' or centrepiece of the Canadian Images Festival of Film, Video and New Media in Toronto, 1997. Artist-in residence projects have taken her to the Slade School of Art in London, the Institute of Contemporary Art of the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, the School of the Chicago Art Institute, the Banff Centre and the Royal University of Stockholm, among others. Frenkel represented Canada at Documenta IX in Kassel, 1992 and at the Club Media of the Venice Biennale in 1997. Her writings have appeared in numerous art publications, among them artscanada, Art Monthly, Dialog, Descant, Fuse, Vanguard, Videoguide and C Magazine.

Vera Frenkel's Body Missing Project (1994 and ongoing), an inquiry into the Kunstraub (art theft) policies of the Third Reich and the fate of artworks missing after World War II, has been shown on four continents and will travel to Vienna for installation at the Sigmund Freud Museum. A new version of this work will be featured as part of the eight-museum event, Video2000, where Frenkel, Krzysztof Wodiczko and Shirin Nishat will give the key speeches at the related symposium at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Frenkel's newest project consists of a group of works in different media under the title , The Institute™: Or, What We Do For Love. These include a poly-serial narrative for the web now in process, co-produced by the Banff Centre and Stadium Network for the Arts, N.Y., in which fictional and documentary modes interrogate each other, mapping the travails of a large cultural organization. The Institute ™, a government-run chain of residences for artists of all disciplines uses shells of former hospitals as sites for its various branches. Cultural bureaucrats from downsized agencies across Canada are retrained for a variety of tasks involved in running it, from gardener to cook, from chaplain to director. The result is a 'ship-of-fools' situation in which matters of both importance and absurdity reveal themselves, offering a lens on what can happen when gifted people gather in dysfunctional contexts. A radio work in this group, "Artists in Residence", was broadcast in Canada on The Arts Today, June 12th, 2000 and can be accessed on-line at http://www.radio.cbc.ca/programs/artstoday/artontheweb, where a web version of the radio project is under construction.

Images accompanying this text are from the Kassel and Toronto versions of the Transit Bar, courtesy of the artist.

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