In 1996 Franklin Furnace closed its physical exhibition space and transformed into a ‘virtual institution’ to bring Internet-based art to audiences across the world. Franklin Furnace today continues its mission to make the world a safer place for avant-garde art by funding innovative artists and archiving their work.

History of Disappearance includes works by major international artists including Eleanor Antin, the Blue Man Group, Patty Chang, Karen Finley, Coco Fusco, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Ana Mendieta, Linda Montano, Matt Mullican, Claes Oldenburg, Reverend Billy and William Wegman.

The show comprises video footage, artists’ books, online works, and artefacts from the archive.

Highlights of the exhibition include video works such as Swimming the Mississippi (1987-1997), by Billy X. Curmano, which documents the artist’s ten year quest to swim from the source of the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, footage one of William Pope.L’s famous street crawls from The Crawl Project and Reverend Billy’s peaceful protests against Starbucks and The Disney Store. Andrea Fraser offers an incisive and humorous guided tour through the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989) and Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance (1980–1981) shows the artist punching in at a time clock, every hour on the hour, twenty-four hours a day, for an entire year.

The photographers supplement the title of their exhibition with the term of Neueinstellung – reorientation – an allusion to the revised approach of these artists, not only to their country but also to themselves. Eight characteristic positions from the large Berlin exhibition were selected for the Goethe Institute’s traveling exhibition. One recurrent theme in all of the eight photographic sequences is the concept of native identity or homeland – formulated in the pervasive, yet elusive German term ‘hiemat’ – as a geographical, social and political determinant, but also as an expression of sentiments and yearnings.

About the Agency Ostkreuz

This agency is called OSTKREUZ. That is the name of an S-Bahn station in Berlin that resembles a wind rose, as it combines lines from all directions. When, in the fall of 1990, seven men and women got together to found the agency, they named it thus. With this they described their location, the East, which had been a country just a moment ago and to whose best photographers they had belonged. At the same time it meant to them a point from which they could start a journey anywhere.

Today OSTKREUZ is the most successful agency led by photographers in Germany. It has eighteen members. Almost each one of them has won prestigious national or international awards. They come from all German regions and also from other countries. The youngest of them is in his mid-twenties, the oldest in her mid-sixties. Each of them looks at the world through different eyes, is interested in different parts of it and travels in a different direction. But they all share their point of departure and return, where they frequently meet again. This is OSTKREUZ. It is an approach. It means approaching reality. There finding materials to work with. Finding the quintessence of things through one’s work, imaging it and staying honest while doing so. It means developing a bearing towards reality, measuring it against it without having to sacrifice one for the other. OSTKREUZ means no more or less than being genuine.

Simone Massera was born in 1983 in Rome, Italy. He’s interested in expressing through pictures the subjective perceptions of social issues and, basically, in exploring what it is to be a human being. These days he lives and works as a freelance photographer in London.
www.simonemassera.com

Maria de la Iglesia was born in Madrid in 1978 and currently lives in London. In her photography she makes use of the absurd as a way of exploring the human condition. It’s a visual and psychological observation that looks with irony and dark humour at the individuals themselves in a context of contrasts.
www.mariadelaiglesia.com

Hannah Lucy Jones was born in the English Midlands in 1980. She is often found photographing dreamily melancholic scenes of everyday life, reflecting her fascination with our subjective emotional experience and a terminal condition commonly known as existential angst. She lives and works in London.
www.hannahlucyjones.com

Samuel Bland was born in 1979 in the north of England. He is particularly interested in combining media – still and moving image, text and sound – to create unusual bodies of work that explore issues of identity, ecology and the relationship between man and his environment. His time is divided between freelance commercial work, pursuing his own personal projects, and teaching.
www.samueljlbland.com

Teresa Cos was born in 1982 in a small town near Venice, Italy. Her photographic research focuses on the transformations of contemporary western society and the anxiety in the struggle for success with which people tend to live. With her images she tries to involve the viewer in the palpable tensions of a society reaching breaking point.
www.teresacos.com