Frauke Frech was born in 1982 in Leipzig, former East-Germany. She studied Performance and Fine Arts with La Ribot and Yan Duyvendak at Haute Ecole d'art et design, Geneva and at Muthesius Academy for Art & Design, Kiel. Frech combines performance art with intervention, video, graphics and text through which she explores personal and social relationships, boundaries and translation processes. In her long-term project My own private Germany she has been working since 2013 – in the sense of social sculpture – with local communities at characteristic places in Germany on our society. So far in Duisburg-Marxloh, Augsburg, Chemnitz, Berlin-Lichtenberg.

Attempt at a self-portrait

Particularly when I am in foreign countries, my name becomes quite difficult for others to get their mouth around. I am given new names, each time becoming someone else. I take in all of these encounters and they shape me – in some cases more strongly than others – into the person I am capable of being. What do my age, degrees and exhibitions – which are supposed to say something about my reputation – really say about me?

Am I the same person that you see in me?

In art, I search for the most powerful means of approaching the other, the goal of this exchange being to discover something that connects us, that lasts beyond this moment, that can alter the reality between us.

At Grand Beauty on Tour, I work with a cosmopolitan ensemble, engaging with the vulnerable, outer limits of the human being. The places where we negotiate with ourselves over beauty and flaws – day in, day out – and where our own self-perception manifests itself.

You normally don't see what lies behind a mirror.

Grand Beauty on Tour is to be a place where social equality can exist for different, culturally shaped concepts of beauty, and where we can gain more intimate insight into the other and into ourselves.