Body Missing

Frenkel’s multidisciplinary practice interrogates the learning and unlearning of cultural memory, the abuses of power and its consequences, and the bureaucratisation of everyday life. As Gottfried Fliedl observed: “Body Missing offers the opportunity to shift the focus of the debates on ‘looted art’ from their mainly everyday and legal-administrative context to the more general issues of memory and the ability to commemorate.”

Body Missing, a six-channel video-photo-web work took the Kunstraub (art theft) policies of the Third Reich as a point of departure for considering a range of issues from collective madness to the nature of memory. “As with much of my work” says Vera Frenkel, “Body Missing walks the edge between documentary and fictional realities…what began as the fiction heard on the videotapes became a reality in the context of the website which followed the Linz project.” It was Hitler’s megalomaniacal dream to create a museum housing the stolen art works in his home town of Linz.

Designed originally as a transient, site-specific work in the context of the Andere Koerper exhibition curated by Singrid Schade (Offenes Kulturhaus Centrum fuer Gegenwartskunst, Linz, 1994), Body Missing has nevertheless found its way to museums and public galleries in nearly a dozen countries, arriving in London fresh from its most recent return to Austria and a major installation of the full six-channel work at the Georg Kargl Gallery, Vienna.