Frank Smith
Born 1968. Writer, poet, video artist and filmmaker. Lives in Paris
"An artisan of language and image," Frank Smith is a writer and poet, video artist and filmmaker.
For over twenty years, Frank Smith has engaged in what he calls "poetic guerrillas" — an artistic practice in which books, films, installations, performances and exhibitions combine to question and investigate cases of State violence and human rights violations worldwide.
"A work of rare sensitivity and integrity."
— Bernard Blistène, Honorary Director, Musée national d'art moderne × Centre Pompidou
"A fascinating body of work."
— Jean-Marie Durand, Les Inrocks, June 2025
"In his films and video installations, Frank Smith brings into play a new ecology of the gaze, conducive to the deployment of a methodology of inter-narration as much as infra-capture — a way of describing without seizing, and of making visible without representing."
— Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Les Inrocks, February 2024
"Frank Smith opens an impressive, even impure path to the practice of poetry…"
— Emmanuel Laugier, Le Matricule des Anges, January 2024
Bureau of Poetic Investigations
Frank Smith is the founder of the Bureau of Poetic Investigations, from which he explores current junctions and disjunctions between poetry, politics and image, investigating the conditions of existence of discourse and images in order to "seek to produce new modes of grasping the world" (Jeff Barda) in its catastrophic reversals.
Renewing the Pasolinian notions of "civic poetry" and "cinema of poetry", Frank Smith delivers "experimental protocols that interrogate the possibility, efficiency, and performativity of literature and film. Extending Artaud's To Have Done with the Judgment of God into a 'To Have Done with the Regime of Representation and Narration,' he constructs book and film devices that stage the question of the emergence of speech or image." (Véronique Bergen, artpress)
Books: A Poetics of Co-Errance
Frank Smith has published some thirty books as well as numerous texts in journals (Nioques, If, Action poétique, Chimères, Lignes, Mouvement, Multitudes, Inculte, Po&sie, etc.).
Since the publication of Guantanamo (Seuil, "Fiction & Cie," 2010; Les Figues Press, translation by Vanessa Place, praise by Avital Ronell, Los Angeles, 2014) — named best book of the year by The Huffington Post in the United States and staged by Éric Vigner — he has developed a forensic poetics drawing on traces left by the American Objectivist poets, while exploring a poetics of "co-errance": both what is invented between artistic disciplines (poetry, moving images, etc.) and what insinuates itself into the geopolitical fault lines of the contemporary world.
Films: Seeing versus Saying
In the continuation of these publications (several of which have been translated into English, Spanish, Czech, Persian, Arabic, Greek, Italian and Turkish), Frank Smith makes films and video installations through which he enacts, in dialogue with Pasolini's "cinema of poetry," the non-relation between seeing and speaking ("making visible what is not said, and saying what cannot be seen").
His films and video installations have all been presented at the Centre Pompidou–Paris (from 2015 to 2025), in solo and group exhibitions, and have been shown at numerous festivals worldwide.
Recent works: Le Film du dehors (2018, 30 min); Les Films du monde / 68 cinétracts (2018–2022, 132 min); Un Film à jamais (2019, 92 min); Le Film de l'absence (2019, 45 min); Le Film du 38e parallèle (2023, 56 min); Le Film des îles solitaires (2023, 17 min); L'Atlas des 2-mers (platform of 12 films and installations, 2023); Le Film du non-lieu (2025, 20 min); Un Film sans autrui (2025, 100 min).
Digital, Radio and Editorial Platforms
Frank Smith is the author of a multimedia work dedicated to migrants in the Mediterranean, Il était six fois sur la terre, created for Museum Fiction, the Centre Pompidou's digital application (2016), and of an online digital device dedicated to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze: deleuzememories.
He is the author of the entries "Bifurcations," "Zigzag" and "Poetry" in the Dictionnaire Gilles Deleuze, forthcoming from Éditions Robert Laffont, Coll. Bouquins, 2026.
Frank Smith is also a publisher: he co-edits with Antoine Dufeu the critical and clinical poetry journal RIP, and directs the book/CD artist collection "ZagZig" at éditions Dis Voir.
He spent many years as a producer at France Culture, where he coordinated the program La poésie n'est pas une solution(2012) and co-directed with Philippe Langlois the sound creation program L'Atelier de création radiophonique from 2001 to 2011.
Recent Residencies and Awards
Frank Smith has recently been:
— Artist in Residence, Villa Al Qamar, Lebanon (Institut français), February 2026
— Artist in Residence, Maison Forte (Lot-et-Garonne), April and June 2026
— Artist in Residence, Villa La Brugère (Normandy), 2025
— Laureate, "Mondes nouveaux" programme, French Ministry of Culture, 2021–2023
— Laureate, "Résidence sur Mesure +" programme, Institut français, South Korea, 2022
— Artist in Residence, Fondation Boghossian (Belgium), 2022
— Artist in Residence, Villa Yourcenar, 2021
— Artist in Residence, L'Échangeur (Bagnolet), 2021
— Artist in Residence, Fondation Jan Michalski (Switzerland), 2019
— Associate Artist, Ateliers Médicis (Clichy-Montfermeil), 2018–19
— Artist in Residence, Beyond Baroque (Los Angeles, USA), 2017–18
— Artist in Residence, Archives nationales (Pierrefitte-sur-Seine), 2016
And upcoming:
— Artist in Residence, Chalet Mauriac, September 2026
— Artist in Residence, Maison Julien Gracq, October 2026
Recent Publications and Projects
Guérillas poétiques, a monograph edited by Jean-Philippe Cazier, was published by éditions Plaine page (November 2023).
Poésies critiques: Jean-Michel Espitallier, Liliane Giraudon, Frank Smith, by Jean-Philippe Cazier, was published in spring 2024 by éditions LansKine.
His poetic practice was the subject of Frédérique Cosnier's doctoral thesis, directed by Serge Martin: Passages de voix, essai d'anthropologie poétique, à partir des œuvres de Stéphane Bouquet, Christophe Manon et Frank Smith (June 2023), Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3.
Latest books: Syrie, l'invention de la guerre, LansKine, 2023; Deleuze Memories, LansKine, 2025; Irak 24 heures, Créaphis, 2025; Le Film qui aurait eu lieu (with Rodolphe Perez), Plaine Page, 2025; mer × soleil, vers un impossible cinéma de poésie?, La Maréchalerie × Créaphis, March 2026.
Latest films: Le Film du 38e parallèle (Centre Pompidou, Paris; selected for Visions du Réel 2024, Nyon, Switzerland, and Kyoto Independent Film Festival, Japan); Un Film sans autrui (commissioned by the Centre Pompidou with support from the Fondation Chantal Akerman, as part of L'Inventaire Deleuze, 2025), Centre Pompidou × Mk2 Bibliothèque, Vidéodrome 2, Marseille.
Latest exhibition: Juste après même si, Galerie Même si, Paris 3rd, spring 2025.
Selected Press
Ce que les images disent du monde — Frank Smith expose à Paris Jean-Marie Durand, Les Inrocks, 2025
Frank Smith: pour une nouvelle écologie du regard Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Les Inrocks, 2024
On Frank Smith
"Frank Smith is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic poets of our time. His books and films are the gift of this enigma, and of the virtuosic discoveries they deploy in order to make it breathe."
— Laurent de Sutter, philosopher
"A precise, committed voice, never superficial nor gongoristic."
— Paul Ardenne, art historian and curator
"The books and films of Frank Smith transform the world into fragments — an essential incompleteness. [...] In this way, the habitual relations between language and the world are reversed: language produces the world, and produces it as viewpoints, flows of possibilities."
— Jean-Philippe Cazier, Mediapart
His works have been presented in numerous art centres, festivals and institutions in France and internationally, including: Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA, USA) · Beyond Baroque (Los Angeles, CA, USA) · Steven Kasher Gallery (New York City, NY, USA) · Goethe-Institut (New York City, NY, USA) · Art Omi (Ghent, NY, USA) · Université de Montréal (Québec) · Festival de poésie de Trois-Rivières (Québec) · Lanus International Film Festival (Argentina) · Este Arte (Punta del Este, Uruguay) · Sapporo International Short Film Festival (Japan) · Jaipur International Film Festival (India) · Goa International Film Festival (India) · Institut français (Seoul, South Korea) · Festival de Cine de La Almunia (Spain) · Venice Architecture Biennale (Italy) · WARM Festival (Sarajevo, Bosnia) · University of Kent (UK) · Ferenczy Museum (Szentendre, Hungary) · Station (Beirut, Lebanon) · Art & Culture (Jounieh, Lebanon) · Institut français (Lebanon) · Pera Museum (Istanbul, Turkey) · Art Pur Gallery (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia) · Hafez Gallery (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia) · DocLisboa (Lisbon, Portugal) · Galerie Analix Forever (Geneva, Switzerland) · Centre de la Photographie Genève (Switzerland) · ArtGenève (Switzerland) · International Festival of Human Rights (Geneva, Switzerland) · Centre Pompidou (Paris) · Palais de Tokyo (Paris) · Fondation LVMH (Paris) · Musée du Louvre-Lens · La Maréchalerie — Centre d'art contemporain (Versailles) · MAC/VAL (Vitry-sur-Seine) · Studio national des arts contemporains Le Fresnoy · Collection Lambert (Avignon) · CAPC (Bordeaux) · La Friche Belle de mai (Marseille) · FRAC PACA (Marseille) · Archives nationales (Pierrefitte-sur-Seine & Paris) · Villa Yourcenar (Saint-Jans-Cappel) · IMEC (Caen) · etc.
