Frank Wasser (b. Dublin, Ireland) is an Irish artist, writer, and educator whose practice operates across performance, text, installation, sculpture, and moving image. His work advances a sustained critical inquiry into the infrastructures of institutional power, labour, and the politics of cultural production, with particular attention to the material and discursive conditions under which art is produced, circulated, and received. Through embodied performance and situated writing, Wasser interrogates authorship, class formation, pedagogy, and the structural frameworks that organise artistic labour and shape contemporary art discourse.
Informed by lived experience within precarious labour economies, his practice frequently addresses the economic and affective dimensions of cultural work. This inquiry is articulated in SPLIT (Zero-Hour Fragments) (MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, 2023), an artist’s book and body of work developed while working on zero-hour contracts across universities, museums, and art institutions. Combining observation, fiction, and critical reflection, the publication and resulting performance examine the embodied consequences of precarity and neoliberal governance on cultural labour, positioning writing as both methodological tool and site of critique.
Wasser has exhibited and performed widely across Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Europe. His work has been presented at institutions including Tate Modern, Tate Britain, South London Gallery, Jerwood Arts, Salzburger Kunstverein, The Bluecoat, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Irish Museum of Modern Art, National Sculpture Factory, PEER, CCA Derry~Londonderry, Pallas Project Space, and Hugh Lane Gallery.
Recent projects include participation in Debt at the Salzburger Kunstverein, Austria (2025), and The Irish Face at the Tate Britain Library in collaboration with Askeaton Contemporary Arts (2025). In 2024, Wasser completed a practice-based doctorate at the University of Oxford, where his research examined the mediation of artistic research, the proliferation of the lecture-performance format, writing as a material, the utilization of critical theory in artistic practices and the institutional frameworks that condition its circulation and reception.
Wasser also teaches in the Art Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. He lives and works between Vienna and London and is represented byCOMMUNE (Vienna), he is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.
