“I just don’t like eggs!”
Andrea Fraser

One of the most radical and influential artists of her generation, Fraser’s pioneering work in institutional critique investigates the social, financial, and affective economies of cultural organizations, fields, groups, and individuals. Performatively embodying the data that she generates through her research, Fraser’s practice is as physical and affective as it is critical and intellectual, working through humour and pathos as well as analysis. Her discursive practice employs staged discussions, performative actions, scripts, data, and museum incursions as devices to shift the art system’s standards and to critically redefine our relations to them.

The artist’s sociological and psychoanalytic approach becomes the lens for questioning the art world and highlighting its contradictions, projections, wills, and wishes. The frame of the Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare–a non-profit institution that stemmed from a private collection with a focus on mostly Western lines of research, such as the Arte Povera, Conceptual Art, and Minimal Art–represents the starting point for an exhibition that analyzes the very concept of art as a commodity and the layered and often contradictory dynamics of ownership between artists and collectors while exposing the structural connections between the art market and wealth concentration, as well as between art and politics.

Fraser’s exhibition represents the opportunity to re-conceptualise culture, class, privilege, and their systemic institutionalization, and to re-think our positions in the art field by re-imagining structures and relations within it. Beginning in the Foundation’s entrance, intended for the reception of visitors, the exhibition develops mainly in the ground floor’s Commission Room. It then occupies and infiltrates other areas of the institution – sometimes as a hyper-text, sometimes as a meta-exhibition-including the collection galleries, the library, the halls and corridors, and the outdoor courtyard.

“I just don’t like eggs!” unfolds in space to mirror the works it contains, namely as a critical analysis and narrative unveiling of the mechanics of the art system. This also defines the institution itself that contains it, its collection, its architectural spaces, its programme and its practical functions.