The interactive art of occupying space

A Plane for Behavers. Photo / Martin Sykes

The idea of pilots walking briskly up and down the street in an almost balletic style came to Alicia Frankovich from an observation in an airport lounge.

"I saw these two pilots look at each other, gain trust in each other that they were going to enter the plane and take 600 passengers up in the air. It was this sort of etiquette and pride thing, and then they strode in unison into the plane," says the artist.

"Often my work sets up a relationship between two people or two things."

Such was a performance at the start of the month where Artspace director Emma Bugden spent an hour hauling on a rope to keep Frankovich suspended from the gallery ceiling. Performance became a central part of Frankovich's work when she moved to Europe in 2007, but she was acting out alongside her sculpture since graduating from AUT in 2002 and moving to Melbourne.

She is interested in the way space is occupied and how authority is enforced in those spaces.

There's also a regard for exercise and repetition, stemming from her childhood experience as a competitive gymnast - until at 12 she froze up at a national championship and gave up the sport.

"It was really serious discipline which involved a lot of training, so it was a psychological connection between the body and the apparatus and also that idea of competition and competitiveness and success and failure, which is also evident in the sculptural and performative works I make.

"I'm interested in the body's interaction with an object and how, when you leave that object, it is loaded as something you have performed on. Like a dead carcass that has been acted on, in the same way when a gymnast interacts with the beam, they mount it and perform their tricks and then leave it."

Bugden says Artspace picked up on Frankovich because "she has a fresh take on physical art, and also she's a New Zealand artist whose work has not been seen much here since she left art school, even though she has been getting a lot of attention in Australia and Europe."

* A Plane for Behavers: Artspace, 300 K Rd, to June 27