| I’m essentially a painter who also works in performance. I come from a visual art background, not “live art” or theater, and this is very important to me as it informs the way my work is read. In the last 20 years or so I have developed ways of working to suit my need at that particular time, in terms of strategy and context, by using performance, painting, installation, sculpture, video, and sound. What I do is my contribution to the society I live in. I use art as a language to communicate the things I care about. For me, this is the most eloquent way I can communicate. | 
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Franko B
Franko B, Still Life, 2005. Photo credit: Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy of the artist.
I’m essentially a painter who also works in performance. I come from a visual art background, not “live art” or theater, and this is very important to me as it informs the way my work is read. In the last 20 years or so I have developed ways of working to suit my need at that particular time, in terms of strategy and context, by using performance, painting, installation, sculpture, video, and sound. What I do is my contribution to the society I live in. I use art as a language to communicate the things I care about. For me, this is the most eloquent way I can communicate.
Everyone is a refugee, including those who are on the fringes of society, marginalized by their sexuality or ethnicity, or anyone with baggage created through the structures of dominant Western capitalist culture. I don’t want to be Coca-Cola or Madonna. I am not interested in my legacy as an artist once I am dead. What I am interested in is in the ideal of a community that is about sharing, engaging, and contributing to language (language is life) rather than having free membership of some art club.
All of my art embodies “me,” and my body is always present in my work whether the form is a live event, a photograph, or an object. Although my work is personal, it is not navel-gazing; it is driven, but it is not about propaganda. I use the body in a way that empowers me, but not as some kind of bourgeois ideal. It is not about me me me, but it is about me and my worth as a human being in today’s society.
I believe in beauty, but in a beauty that is not detached from life. My concern is to make the unbearable bearable, to provoke the viewer to reconsider their own understandings of beauty and of suffering.
