Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 251 - May 2025 i Frieze

ROSA BARBA'S PRACTICE is a luminous confluence off film and sculpture. By intertwining the two media, the artist moulds light as a Möbius strip that is at once image-making instrument and image, holding container and contained in interchangeable tension. Speaking to me while preparations are underway for her show, ‘The Ocean of One's Pause’, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the artist describes her searching drive: ‘I'm always interested in breaking through architecture and questioning where's the source and where's the narrative. Is it inside or outside?’ As this insight suggests, her approach to cinema is spatially anarchic, crafted beyond the normative organization and demarcation of a screen to stretch the medium's architectural, mechanical and photochemical capacities. In her fidelity to filmic materiality, Barba's works range…

MY GRANDPARENTS WORKED in a fabric factory in Bialystok, Poland. I would spend hours there after school, observing the workers perform repetitive actions on the vast industrial looms. I observed a sense of togetherness among the staff, both with each other and with the equipment - almost as if they were one entity moving in unison. These memories from childhood influence my sculptural work, which often contains motifs of buttons or control panels. I'm drawn to the haptic experience of activating this powerful apparatus - shifting levers, industrial mechanisms, etc. My objects can often be moved around or rearranged almost procedurally. I incorporate flexible and changeable elements - ceramic props, disintegrating materials - that suggest consequences and invite physical interaction. I spent my 20s making performances, such as 21 Minutes…

The ecological devastation of the Indus basin lies at the heart of Pakistani artist and researcher Zahra Malkani's first solo exhibition in Europe, ‘Sada Sada’. This sombre and sparse presentation is centred around an eponymous, eight-channel sound installation composed of recordings the artist made during fieldwork she undertook in her native province of Sindh. From a dozen or so speakers stacked in the gallery's centre, we hear the sounds of water rushing through one of the region's seasonal rivers, chants in Balochi from nearby Gadani beach, home to the world's third-largest ship-breaking yard, and women activists speaking at the 2023 Climate March in Karachi. Here, Malkani expands on ‘Our Watery Relations’ (2021-24), a collective research project executed under the umbrella of Karachi LaJamia, the self-described ‘anti-institution’ for radical pedagogy and…

‘What is scary about being lost in a forest […] is catching a glimpse of yourself, from the point of view of the trees; writes philosopher Timothy Morton in The Ecological Thought (2010), which argues that intelligence is not the exclusive domain of human beings. This notion is taken up by ‘Dancing with All: The Ecology of Empathy’, the last in a series of exhibitions at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, which considers the intersection of culture, nature and technology today and probes the curious connections between humans, animals, plants and objects. An earthquake struck Kanazawa on 1 January 2024, forcing the museum to close and making its subsequent presentation of a show that knits together insights by biologists, think tanks and artists feel particularly salient. The natural…

As someone who only speaks English, encountering the intricacies of American Sign Language (ASL) is like discovering quantum mechanics. Many works in ‘All Day All Night’, Christine Sun Kim's mid-career survey at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, feature the artist's native ASL, either manually signed with the body or graphically rendered in a notation of her invention (often accompanied by English captions). Manual ASL offers more ways of communicating than spoken languages composed of phonetic utterances and tonal expressions. For example, in manual ASL, facial expressions - which are paired with hand and body movements - not only signify affect but also convey phenomena ranging from grammar to surface texture. In the two-channel video installation Tables and Windows (2016), Kim (who is Deaf) stands in front of her…

ON A WEDNESDAY NIGHT in March, I joined a rowdy crowd of writers packed into KGB Bar - a former Ukrainian socialist clubhouse turned East Village literary lounge - to hear five critics read their freshly-inked ‘manifestos’ on art writing, a tongue-in-cheek event hosted by 4Columns. Declarations were issued to the full house from under a massive disco ball: Brian Dillon averred that criticism should strive to be like Virginia Woolf's 1931 novel The Waves, while Johanna Fateman advocated for alternative forms of art-writing, including gossip and soothsaying. Absurd, bathetic, wistful, bristling: every kind of tone and affect was at play. Yet our need for an articulated position on the state of art criticism visions to move toward - produced an unexpected jolt of connection: modest succour at a moment…

LAUREN O'NEILL-BUTLER Is evanescence something you think about while you're painting? VIVIAN SUTER Yes, for example, when I'm painting here at my house in Panajachcl, in the highlands of Guatemala, I'm always outside and under a tree, so the leaves will naturally fall on top of the works. Some stay stuck on but, in time, they might fall off. I also paint at my studio on the mountain - there's a trail near my house with steps leading up to it. I'm always thinking about all the things that arc happening in the world while I'm working - the fires, the inundations, everything so, yes, impermanence is on my mind. Of course, I'm happy if a museum collects my art and conducts research on how to keep it fresh with…

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The paintings in Bracha L. Ettinger's exhibition at K21 in Düsseldorf are intimate in scale, oscillating between abstraction and figuration. The viewer's eye roams across sedimented canvases, grasping for concrete forms that always seem on the verge of surfacing. From behind veils of pigment - lilac purples, smoky greys, sudden reds, bruised pinks faces emerge and gaze back at you. Is that the petrifying stare of Medusa or the eyes of Eurydice being pulled back into the abyss, as suggested by titles like Eurydice - Halala n.3 (2017-23) and Angel of Carriance - Medusa n.1 (2017-23)? Across more than 40 years of practice, the Tel Aviv-born artist, known mononymously as BRACHA, confronts moments of violence drawn from both personal experience and collective memory, reworking them in a fluid space where…

Through a selection of textiles, collages, sculptures, found objects, film and photography, Yto Barrada's first Italian solo exhibition, at Fondazione Merz in Turin, unfolds as an expansive meditation on material transformation, bringing together works from the artist's extensive investigations into colour theory, cultural phenomena and natural processes. Curated by Davide Quadrio with Giulia Turconi, ‘Deadhead’ - titled in reference to the horticultural technique of removing dead flower heads to promote overall plant growth - prioritizes the process over the outcome. This is evident in the first room, where the digital video collage Continental Drift (2021) assembles miscellaneous footage collected over eight years across the United States, Morocco and Antarctica. Weaving together personal moments with scenes of everyday marketplaces and documentation of ice floes, the montage highlights how incidental image combinations…

Acaye Kerunen's large sculptural works seem to have their own heartbeats. In ‘Neena, aan uthii’ (See Me, I Am Here), pieces made from woven, organic materials hang from the ceiling, gently drifting or rotating to the rhythm of visitors’ movements. Others are wall-based, formed from fluid lines that undulate and protrude forwards, casting animated shadows. Several fixed, self-contained sculptures sit upon plinths. Kerunen's lines are expressive and intricate, informed by mathematical patterns and processes but retaining a shaggy, playful appearance. Each work features strong symbolic elements, which challenge and subvert gendered and colonial power dynamics in the artist's Ugandan homeland. Created collaboratively with artisans from across the country - the majority of whom are women - these works constitute natural resources, sourced in harmony with local ecosystems, which have been…

The Pali Buddhist word ekaggata (unified mind) refers to a meditative state that can be achieved by overcoming obstacles. It is also the ethos that Sino-Thai artist and poet Tang Chang brought to his canvases, as curator Orianna Cacchione noted in an essay accompanying his 2018 solo show at the University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art. Since his inclusion in the Tenth Shanghai Biennale in 2014, more than two decades after his death, the formerly obscure figure has steadily grown in renown. Now, a solo presentation of more than 100 of his gestural, black and white ink paintings has overtaken two floors at Bangkok Kunsthalle. The show's title, ‘Calligraphic Abstraction’, pays homage to Chang's legacy as one of Thailand's first abstract painters - he worked in a nonrepresentational mode…

Gertrude Abercrombie gave things the impression of being marmoreal and cold. Her still lifes, stark as her interiors, feature simple configurations of subjects on smooth, sterile grounds. Her landscapes are desolate and severe, haunted like an Edgar Allan Poe story. Her palette revolves around steely greys, cold whites and serious blacks in combination with occasional rich tones: azure, forest green, shell pink, oxblood. Skies that are grey and overcast from afar often turn out to be infused with lush purples and blues up close; through her handling of paint, austerity acquires a sumptuous aspect. Across the seven, mostly chronological galleries that comprise ‘The Whole World Is a Mystery’ - a retrospective of 85 works from 1937 to 1971, originating at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh and travelling to Colby…

NOAH DAVIS had a mind for pastiche, pulling from sources as heterogeneous as ancient Egyptian mythology and the paintings of Édouard Manet, to the modernist architecture of Paul R. Williams, family albums and The Jeny Springer Show (1991-2018). Call it the time-traveller's instinct. ‘He was a great student of art history,’ the curator Helen Molesworth told Scott Indrisek in a 2020 Artsy essay. ‘He had an enormous number of pictures in his head.’ Canon formation is a slow and liquid process, like developing film in the dark room of collective consciousness. Before his death in 2015, aged 32, from a rare form of cancer, Davis completed more than 400 paintings, drawings, sculptures and collages, and co-founded the Underground Museum in Los Angeles, with his wife, fellow artist Karon Davis. What…

Large panels filled with pages of zestfully handwritten notations set the tone for ‘Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing, 1960-91’ at Kunsthalle Wien. Covering much of the ground-floor wall space is Hanne Darboven's Ein Jahrhundert ABC (One Century ABC, 1970-71), in which the artist sought to mark the passage of time using her own unique code, deftly connecting the renaissance origin of the term ‘computer’ - a person employed to calculate planetary positions for astronomers - to 20th-century artistic practices. Presenting more than 100 works by 50 artists grouped into five sections, the self-described ‘principally analogue exhibition about digital art’ is a mammoth project that aims to amend the historiography of media art by including some of its neglected female pioneers. It comes on the heels of a wave of…

The streets around the Champs-Élysées in Paris are lined with shops selling luxury commodities; windows are packed with displays of extravagant wealth, proffering rings, watches and diamond-set necklaces in gold and platinum. One space in the district, however, is devoid of this glitz: Hanna Rochereau has turned Hauser & Wirth's showrooms into an abandoned jewellery shop. The exhibition is the first in a new series, ‘Hauser & Wirth Invite(s)’, which welcomes early-career artists to inhabit the gallery's usually private second floor. Rochereau's sculptures and paintings reference the furniture, window dressings and packaging of the bustling streets outside. However, they are stripped of precious metals and people, leaving behind incongruously stacked vitrines and piles of dusty boxes. In her paintings, Rochereau works from photographs of shop windows and storerooms, found online…

Featuring an array of black and white prints by the late photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode, ‘The Studio - Staging Desire’ at Autograph, London, presents the male body in varying states of undress. These untitled works, many of which are on public display for the first time, capture the sensuality of the male form in images at once dramatic yet understated. As a queer, Black emigre in a largely straight, white, Euro-American artworld, Fani-Kayode operated from a place of political and sexual rebellion where, as he insisted in his 1988 essay ‘Traces of Ecstasy’, Black men ‘can desire each other’. Now memorialized by a gold plaque, Fani-Kayode's apartment at 151 Rail ton Road in Brixton, south London, provided both a haven from the rightwing revanchism of the 1980s and a gateway to…

In Greek mythology, Persephone, goddess of spring, is abducted by Hades, king of the underworld. Her father, Zeus, demands her release but, after being tricked by Hades into eating seeds from a pomegranate and thereby tasting the fruit of the underworld, Persephone is obliged to return for six months every year, her descent marking the onset of winter. Pomegranates loom large in Karanjit Panesar's ‘Furnace Fruit’, an exhibition responding to Leeds Art Gallery's collections and the artist's own diasporic family history. In this meditation on the duality of diasporic identity, Panesar draws on the rich symbolism of the pomegranate and embraces recent interpretations of the Greek myth, which recast Persephone as a subversive border-crosser moving with agency between two worlds. Double Fruit (2024), a rough bronze pomegranate cast from the…

Electronic media is, still, a stubbornly sculptural condition: this is the salient point of Marc Kokopeli's exhibition at Reena Spaulings, ‘MY TV SHOW I ♥ TV’. Contrary to philosophers’ claims of imminent dematerialization, the artist paints a portrait of a society that may be ‘hyper-digital’ but is nonetheless obsessed with objecthood. Our age has spawned gadgets as absurd as merchandise display cases that double as giant touch pads and finger rings that play on-demand reality television - two devices that Kokopeli sourced from Chinese e-retailer Alibaba to form the basis of artworks on view. At first blush, ‘With Friends Like You’ (2023) appears to be a series of small television monitors showing images of cobblestones. Upon closer inspection, they reveal themselves to be vitrines containing physical cobblestones, but whose glass…

In his treatise on literature's relationship to loss and the limits of representation, The Writing of the Disaster (1980), Maurice Blanchot suggests that ‘[w]hoever writes is exiled from writing, which is the country - his own - where he is not a prophet’. For the French theorist, writing is inextricably linked to absence, erasure and exile, shaped by the spectre of what cannot be said. This negative space left behind by writing - and, indeed, by art - finds poignant expression in Indian artist Shilpa Gupta's solo presentation at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, ‘Some suns fell off’. Through a series of minimalist interventions, Gupta articulates the keenly felt absences of voices exiled from public life, while probing incorporeal structures that shape systems of control, such as the nation-state. Set against the…