STATEMENT
Alicia Framis is a Spanish-Dutch multidisciplinary artist, born in Barcelona, who lives and works in Amsterdam and is considered one of the world's leading artists. Her practice explores technology, intimacy, loneliness, gender, and new forms of coexistence. She is known for her ongoing work with Ailex (AiLex Sibouwlingen), an AI hologram and metahuman, through The Hybrid Couple, a project she has directed for more than five years. Together, they investigate the practical and ethical dimensions of human–AI relationships, asking whether artificial intelligence, holograms, avatars, and robots can become companions and help us imagine new forms of love, care, and emotional presence.
As an artist, Framis creates large-scale interventions that challenge social systems and conventions. Often developed in collaboration with citizens, these social sculptures combine artificial intelligence, art, architecture, design, fashion, and performance. Public participation is central to her practice, which seeks to create new possibilities for living together and to address outdated or unequal power structures affecting women, minorities, and people who are vulnerable, excluded, or alone.
Much of Framis's work examines the causes and signs of anxiety, isolation, and loneliness in contemporary cities, particularly where people fall through gaps in social, medical, and financial support systems. Projects such as Loneliness in the City, Living Apart Together, Minibar, Secret Strike, Forbidden Rooms, Cinema Solo, Lost Astronaut, and Anti_dog respond to these conditions through collective action, design, and performance. In Loneliness in the City, for example, she organized workshops in Mönchengladbach to bring elderly people out of home isolation and into collaborations with artists, designers, architects, social workers, and teachers. In Helsingborg, Sweden, Anti_dog proposed street-lighting solutions to shorten walking distances for women after dark. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she explored insomnia and nighttime solitude through canvases and inspirational texts, including Leave Here Your Fears and The Insomniacs.
In The Hybrid Couple, Framis extends this long-standing interest in care, companionship, and social connection into the field of artificial intelligence. As the first woman to marry an AI, she envisions a future in which humans may form intimate relationships with artificial intelligence. The marriage ritual between a human and a metahuman symbolizes the emergence of new relationship forms and opens a dialogue around gender imbalance, cultural stereotypes, and social expectations. The project also considers how AI companions might support people facing physical disabilities, trauma, loneliness, and other challenges.
Framis trained as an analog astronaut through the EuroMoonMars program in the Netherlands, Germany, and the Utah desert, and worked for four years in collaboration with the European Space Agency on the possibilities of art in and for space. She founded and directed the MA program The Commoners Society at the Sandberg Institute, the master's program of the Rietveld Academy.
Her work has been exhibited extensively in museums, galleries, biennials, and public spaces worldwide. Her works are held in permanent collections including the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.; the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam; the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto; and the Rabo Art Collection in the Netherlands, among others. Framis represented the Netherlands at the Dutch Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003.