Me And Franko B

London is going to do my head in, in a VERY good way! Like, FRANKO B!!!! I almost crying already....

Don’t Leave Me This Way is a brief, intense work that marks a formal departure from Franko B’s blood-based practice. Here, his body is presented naked and unpainted, seated on a raised plinth or altar. A bank of bright lights floods the audience to the point of averting their gaze. Carefully choreographed with lighting designer Kamal Ackarie, this “blinding” technique mimics the effect that Franko’s bleeding body has often had on audiences, whilst opening up a new range of responses. Franko allows the audience time to look at his body and approach it as a sculptural form, a form heavily tattooed and scarred, voluptuous in shape and size. It is an unusual entity and lends itself well to the gaze, a tendency that the artist encounters daily in public and which he has exploited to great effect in performance, over a period of fifteen years.