Robbert&Frank Frank&Robbert

After we graduated with a master’s degree in visual arts from KASK (Ghent, 2012) we have chosen to go through life as the artist duo Robbert&FrankFrank&Robbert. This intense collaboration forms the basis for our artistic practice and symbolizes our vision on friendship, collectivity, interplay and knowledge sharing. Together, we realise a multidisciplinary body of works, containing objects, prints, installations, videos, actions in public places and cross-over performances on the border between arts and theatre. With our works, we actively relate to the global society and formulate questions and poetical alternatives.

Besides our participation in official exhibitions and festivals, we show our works with self-initiated actions in public spaces, as well in Belgium as abroad. We see this as a strategy to reach more people, to continuously evaluate our experiments and to broaden our network.

We constantly collaborate with other artists, artistic organisations and initiatives. It helps us to further embed ourselves within the local and global artistic field. But more importantly we consider this relational aspect as a necessary and meaningful component of a contemporary artistic practice – allowing us to share our knowledge and to interact with others.

It is our opinion that, as artists, we have a responsibility to share our knowledge, insights and questions in the broadest way, also with people who are not professionally involved within the artistic field. We take part in symposia, lectures and study groups and we organise workshops and master classes. Frank Merkx represents Robbert&Frank Frank&Robbert in De Jonge Academie voor Wetenschap en Kunst, an interdisciplinary and Interuniversitary meeting place for young scientists and artists.

The Reshape project resonates on multiple levels with us. But our most hands-on experience is probably in fair/open governance models. Selected overview of works, cv.