Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 246 - October 2024 i Frieze

IN OCTOBER 1999, after more than two decades directing experimental films, Yvonne Rainer returned to dance. It was like ‘coming home’, she told me in a 2015 interview for Artpress. The event took place at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square in New York, the very same venue where, in the early 1960s, Rainer – along with like-minded artists such as Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton and Robert Rauschenberg – redefined what movements counted as dance by introducing commonplace actions like walking, running and skating into their performances, and championing an anti-virtuoso sensibility. The programme that night centred on Trio A, a four-and-a-half-minute choreography which Rainer premiered in 1966. At the time, Trio A knocked down expressionist expectations of modern dance: it demanded a uniform motion flow, with…

WHEN I WORK ON A FILM, I always ask myself: what is dance going to bring to it? There was absolutely no indication about dance or choreography when I first read the script for Emilia Pérez (2024); however, all the music and dialogue was already written. I thought it would be challenging to bring dance into such a structured story. The director, Jacques Audiard, had no specific vision for this aspect of the film, and he had never worked with a choreographer. I think he hired me in part because I've worked in theatre and understand the actor-director relationship. Jacques is constantly tweaking his scripts. Just when you think you've completed something, he'll ask you to try something new. For him, the ideas only coalesce once the cameras are rolling.…

A small watercolour caught my eye at the entrance to ‘Herstory’, Judy Chicago's current survey at the LUMA Foundation, Arles. In this drawing, part of the 140-work series ‘Autobiography of a Year (1993-94)’, a crudely rendered woman is about to be hit on the head by a man holding a mallet. An accusation in a mix of loopy cursive and capital letters encloses her from above and below. ‘You make BAD ART,’ the text reads. ‘IT HURTS.’ While he may not have held a mallet over Chicago's head, the critic Hilton Kramer must have caused real offence to the artist when he asked in his New York Times review of her eponymous 1980 show at the Brooklyn Museum: ‘Is The Dinner Party even art?’ Before concluding that, even if it…

Over the past decade, London-based Danish artist Sidsel Meineche Hansen has frequently used artworks to represent larger, often invisible, economic processes and systems. ‘Metal Works’, her current solo show at Ordet in Milan, takes a formalist approach, including a rich assortment of stand-alone pieces – as well as elements extracted from larger, multimedia installations – connected by the titular material. Decontextualized, these works appear silent: but, by paying close attention to their shiny surfaces and colourful oxidation, we become aware that Hansen is, once again, using materials as a starting point for a broader reflection on the opaque nature of capitalist – and artistic – production. In the series ‘Hollow Eyed’ (2017), for instance, six seemingly identical silicon-metal sculptures are neatly arranged on the wall. Simultaneously evoking emojis and death…

At this year's Venice Biennale, Mataaho Collective, a group of four Aotearoa-based Māori artists, took the Golden Lion award for a show-stopping installation of woven straps. Some 18,000 kilometres away, at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, a brand-new triennial offers an invigorating cross-section of the diverse, vibrant artistic milieu from which the collective emerged. Curated by Natasha Conland and Cameron Ah Loo-Matamua, the inaugural edition of Aotearoa Contemporary assembles media-spanning work by 27 mostly local artists, many of whom could be characterized as emerging or underrecognized. The show begin quietly with lens-based artist Meg Porteous's single-channel video Carrier (2024), which explores processes of narrative filmmaking. An accompanying photographic suite, A Shade (33 frames) Rhea, Rebecca, Marianne, Fergus, Grant (2024), includes rehearsal documentation, framing tests, extreme close-ups and location shots.…

Curated by the painter and Slade School of Fine Art lecturer Peter Davies, ‘On Feeling’ brings together works by 11 emerging artists, most of them born in the 1990s, who live or have studied in the British capital. This intimately scaled exhibition is, in part, a reflection on generational difference, an attempt to both measure and learn from a perceived cultural and psychological gulf between Gen X and Gen Z. As Davies writes in an accompanying text, during his own studies at ‘Goldsmiths in the mid-1990s, just after the YBAs […] there was a prioritizing of criticality and […] certain things felt forbidden to discuss, particularly emotion. Self-expression seemed embarrassing and subjectivity had to be rhetorized.’ In contrast, he notes how art students today place great importance on their ‘lived…

In The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (2014), poet Kei Miller sketches two opposing worldviews through mapmaking. The cartographer prioritizes scientific objectivity, while the rastaman understands mapping as subjective and political. ‘Draw me a map of what you see,’ says the latter, ‘then I will draw a map of what you never see / and guess me whose map will be bigger than whose? / Guess me whose map will tell the larger truth?’ Pio Abad's ‘To Those Sitting in Darkness’ is a lyrical meditation on cultural loss and the possibilities of reclaiming mapping for revolutionary retellings of histories of empire. The exhibition's touchstone is I am singing a song that can only be borne after losing a country (2023), a drawing of the underside of Powhatan's…

American novelist, playwright, essayist and poet Aram Saroyan is celebrated for his one-word poems designed to defamiliarize language. Three of his poems adorn the walls of ‘Aram Saroyan: Writing with Colors’ at Francis Gallery, a spare yet rich show that intersperses his literary creations with his lesser-known, visual-art output. The exhibition begins by historicizing Saroyan's practice. Displayed on either side of a central, curved wall are two watercolours on paper made in the summer of 1959, when the young writer, then living in Paris, encountered the work of Russian-born French abstract painter Serge Poliakoff. Evincing the influence of Poliakoff's taschisme, Untitled #1 (1959) is characterized by irregular dabs and splotches of colour in a panoply of hues: blue, red, yellow, green and grey. Because it was executed on thin paper…

AT THE AGE OF 21, after damaging her lungs through prolonged exposure to toxic materials at an school, Rebecca Horn spent a year convalescing. Confined to her sick bed, she began experimenting with prosthetics and restrictive choreographies, eventually going on to develop the series ‘Body Extensions’ (1968-ongoing). An early example, documented in a photograph, depicts a nude woman bound in red fabric bandages that extend down from her arms and seemingly anchor her to the ground (Arm Extensions, 1968). In the catalogue for her 1977 exhibition ‘Drawings, Objects, Video, Films’ at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Horn described the arms as ‘isolation columns’ while her body was ‘crisscrossed like a mummy; all movements became impossible’. Shaped through the prism of youthful illness, Horn's understanding of bodily movement instigated a career-long reckoning with…

In 2023, the Royal Ballet presented ‘Rhythm in Resilience’, a festival curated by choreographer Joseph Toonga, celebrating Black histories and achievements in dance. This month, principal dancer Joseph Sissens will be curating a new iteration titled ‘Legacy’. The two met this summer to discuss their programmes and their experiences at the Royal Ballet. JOSEPH TOONGA The catalyst for the ‘Rhythm in Resilience’ festival was the film of the same name, in which you featured, of course. JOSEPH SISSENS It was beautiful. As dancers, we have our own voices but, in your film, we spoke about our experiences differently. We really owned up to our race, which sounds odd but, in the ballet world, you can be so invested in assimilating that you forget who you are. But our stories matter,…

Alvin Ailey gave the world of dance many decades of extraordinary memories, and those of us fortunate enough to have experienced his company's performances surely have a favourite. Your first Revelations (1960). Maybe your 30th. The first time you watched Judith Jamison dance Cry. Or the time you cried as Jamison took her last spin in this classic. Filing into theatre scats with mum and dad, grandma, aunties, the kids – all soon united in wonder at a big stage filled with performers of exquisite technique, charisma and soul.Ailey's legacy, though, is more than nostalgia. Here, some members of the Ailey community share what made him an innovative visionary, not only for his company but for the field of dance and society at large. Sylvia Waters Former company member; artistic…

Many people probably passed through WIELS without noticing Joseph Kusendila's recent exhibition, ‘Platteau, Groupe Theatral’. Others, enticed by the free entrance, were disappointed to find the doors to the first-floor galleries locked. The show was not closed, however, but limited to the transitional space of the elevator landing. Think of it as a reduced summer service. The exhibition also extended to the Royal Film Archive of Belgium (CINEMATEK), where, every Sunday from 6 June to 21 July, devoted viewers gathered for a free screening of the artist's short film, Groupe Theatral (2024). At WIELS, the exhibition began outside with Verre cathédrale (Cathedral Glass, 2024). The 80 first-floor windows of the building were covered with mirrored vinyl that revealed the distinctive texture of their 20th-century rolled glass. In an ambiguous act…

Cukrarna, Ljubljana, Slovenia In 2000, as part of Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana, Šejla Kamerić created the site-specific installation EU/Others (2000), in which she positioned two double-sided signs, resembling checkpoints, above the heads of pedestrians on parallel bridges in the city centre. The signs, which read ‘EU Citizens’ and ‘Others’, effectively ‘categorized’ the unwitting participants in one of the two groups as they crossed the bridges. Almost a quarter of a century later. a version of EU/Others is again on view in Ljubljana, this time as part of the Bosnian artist's survey show, ‘Perfect Tense’, at Cukrarna. Presented as a single lightbox and hung from the ceiling, this reinterpretation of the piece, made in 2022, slowly spins 360 degrees in a dim corridor, as if to suggest that, all these years…

War, it must be said, is ugly. The advent of photography brought this reality home in a new way, as 19th-century conflicts such as the American Civil War (1861-65) were documented with a harrowing verisimilitude not offered by painting. This sense of immediacy intensified with the rise of television; the horrific visuals coming out of the Vietnam War (1955-75), dubbed the ‘first televised war’, famously shaped US popular opinion. In her multidisciplinary work, Pictures Generation artist Gretchen Bender probed mediatized violence, examining how images of power and brutality operate as they circulate in mass media. A selection of Bender's videos and prints, along with archival material, is now on view in a new solo exhibition, ‘The Perversion of the Visual’, at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles. The late artist was…

Nestled in the Aburrá Valley in the central range of the Colombian Andes, the city of Medellín emerged from the basin of its eponymous river. The mid-20th century's rapid industrialization resulted in the canalization of this waterway: restructuring natural deviations into a straight, concrete path. Stripped of its original beauty, the river became a receptacle for the city's sewage and industrial discharge. Tania Candiani's spectacular solo exhibition, ‘Ofrenda’ (Offering), is anchored by a sonic and sculptural lament for this history. Curated by Emiliano Valdés at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (MAMM), the show centres three major new works made for – and, in many senses, with – the museum and its publics. Prólogo (siete campanas) (Prologue [Seven Bells], 2024) is an instrumental installation of trumpet-shaped woven forms hung…

LOOKING AT TACITA DEAN'S Crowhurst (2006), I am confronted by a worrying gap in my memory. It depicts a yew tree said to be 4,000 years old. located on the grounds ofa 12th-century church in England – or, more specifically, in Crowhurst. a small village in East Sussex, a few miles from where I went to school. In Dean's image, the Crowhurst Yew looks like it should be a local landmark; the composition's not-quite-erased background betrays the tree's huge size, looming over the surrounding gravestones, while its bloated, cracked trunk reveals a cavity that seems purpose-built for after-school activities – a meeting place, a pissoir, a smoking room. Despite the fact that I have no recollection of the yew, I can imagine this inner chamber, both cramped and spacious, knots sticking…

JS ‘We belong! We're breathing!’ I wouldn't have believed that ‘Legacy’ could be possible if you hadn't done the festival. The programme came out of the title. I am the physical legacy of the hard work of others – like Carlos Acosta, Fernando Montaño and Eric Underwood – who were here before me. I didn't know I belonged in the ballet until I saw their images outside the building. I'm leaving a legacy here by even existing. But it won't be one based on the roles I play; that's my career, and it won't affect anyone else. My legacy is the work I do to assure others have a better experience than me. I want to make the Royal Opera House a Black space for three days. And not just…

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As a key figure of the 1920s avant-garde, German dadaist Hannah Höch was one of the first artists to engage with the power of images in the media. Her job with a major German publisher gave her access to piles of magazines, which she cut up and pieced together to make photomontages. While these works have been widely shown since Höch's death in 1978, the intelligence of ‘Assembled Worlds’, currently on view at Vienna's Belvedere, lies in making connections between Höch's collages and her passion for avant-garde film of the era, with its comparable techniques of cutting, composition and montage. As a cinema enthusiast, the artist was well-versed in the innovative ways in which form, structure and colour were tackled by visionary filmmakers of the era. In the period after…

‘Water Resistance’ is Ade Darmawan's first show in Indonesia in 12 years. Spanning Cemeti – Institute for Art and Society in Yogyakarta and ROH Projects in Jakarta, where Darmawan is based, the two-venue exhibition spotlights an artist perhaps best known as a founding member of the collective ruangrupa. In one corner of Cemeti – where, as a young graduate, he staged his first-ever solo presentation in 1997 – are five repurposed oil drums heated by gas burners (Konsentrasi Formal Per Barrel, 2024). Organic materials, including nutmeg, cloves and jasmine, transform as they travel from the tanks through jerry-rigged exhaust pipes and glass condensers, eventually oozing into jars in the form of dark, aromatic distillates. Studying the rigs, I started to sweat. Darmawan chose these materials because they appear in Pramoedya…

‘Colony’, ‘Snuff’ and ‘Opium’ read the labels adorning the three oversized, earthenware perfume bottles in Renee So's fourth solo show at Kate MacGarry. Re-creating fragrances by Jean Patou, Elsa Schiaparelli and Yves Saint Laurent respectively, the sculptures (‘Colony’ by Jean Patou, ‘Opium’ Snuff Bottle and ‘Snuff by Schiaparelli’ Perfume Bottle, all 2024) allude to the British Opium trade in China, which is referenced in a number of works on show. The artist reproduces the Yves Saint Laurent Opium bottle faithfully, albeit on a larger scale, but deviates from the original design by leaving a circular hole in place of the logo, divorcing the vessel from its function. This underscores its emptiness while offering up the container for scrutiny. Throughout the show, So draws attention to the historic realities obscured or…

Bald assertions may be relatively rare in the vocabulary of art, but Susan Cianciolo doesn't shy away from them in her fourth solo exhibition at Bridget Donahue. After a turn on the makeshift runway during the show's opening, two garments adorned with the handwritten phrase ‘GOD IS A JACKET’ are now set on hangers and suspended midair from thick wires in the huddle of 28 costumes that comprise RUN 15 (1995-2024). Akin to the artist's previous upcycled ready-to-wear ensembles in her ongoing ‘RUN’ project, these riotously textured and patch-work clothes generally appear as if they could have been made by Cianciolo and her array of collaborators at any point over the course of her decades-long practice. As it turns out, pieces from her very first ‘RUN’ collection were absorbed into…

In his 1969 essay ‘Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatán’, a road-tripping Robert Smithson riffs, conflictedly, on guidebook perspectives on bygone Mesoamerica. Both road trip and riff pay stylistic homage to Jack Kerouac, another mid-century artist who succeeded in thumbing his nose at US/European canon-makers while building a fantastic career among them. A prodigious if whimsical thinker, Smithson didn't take much from his time's decolonial or eco-critical thought (e.g., Frantz Fanon or Rachel Carson). Witness the artist, in his text ‘A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites’ (1968), articulating his representation of New Jersey's Pine Barrens as ‘mapped … in terms of esthetic boundaries rather than political or economic’. Though Smithson has been branded an icon of land art, his overarching project was more an ongoing conceptualist enterprise. This is evident from…