Linda Franke 
Dual telescope
Concrete and plexiglass 2024


From the artist:

“In dual telescopes, Franke celebrates the human eagerness to invent useful devices driven by the quest for knowledge of the unknown.


At the same time, she is interested in displaying the futility of human endeavors and the general promises of devices.

Telescopes are optical instruments invented to observe distant objects, magnifying something that is too far away for our eyes to see.


Franke's telescope instead is an invitation to look through a pile of concrete at each other.
She sets out to explore how objects and their shapes carry instructions for performances
and how the body responds to them.


What do we do with objects that pretend to have a function through their shape but in the end have none?

Another repeating theme in her work is the contingency of different components of a sculpture.
The concrete sculpture needs the investigative plexiglass structure to stand up and the plexiglass structure can not stand up without the concrete objects.

Concrete is an everyday material that everyone is familiar with.


The street we drive and walk on and the walls surrounding us are made out of concrete.
Its architectural and structural qualities are undermined and stretched in Franke´s work where it
appears to be organic and vulnerable, almost unable to hold itself together in the precarious situations that she casts it into.

The two shapes seem to oscillate in a threshold, between a body and a column, somehow stuck in a transformation that is not fully realized.


In some places, the metal armature is visible indicating the struggle of the material to hold on to something.

Franke´s sculptural practice is an extension of her performance work and her experiments in virtual space, in which she questions, why we do the things we do the way we do and wonders what it would look like if we don't.


In these scenarios, she stages altered or invented routines to exhibit the close relationship between futility and freedom, agency, and chance. Working in between virtual and real space she is interested in capturing the qualities of the physical body within its limitations in contrast to the always intact and transformable objects created with software.”

@less_legs