Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 253 - September 2025 i Frieze

Helen Cammock is an artist. Her exhibition ‘Pelicans Dive at Half Light’ is on view at Kate MacGarry Gallery, London, UK, until 25 October. Music: Song of Myself, p. 33 Juliet Jacques is a writer and filmmaker. Her most recent book is The Woman in the Portroit: Collected Short Stories 2008-2024 (Cipher Press, 2024). Music: Song of Myself, p. 33 Eric Otleno Sumba is a writer and editor at Haus der Kulturen dcrWeh, Berlin, Germany. 1,500 Words: Des1ina1ion: Tashken1, p. 80 David Grubbs is distinguished professor of music at Brooklyn College, New York, US, and The Gradualc Center, CUNY, US. His books include Good night the pleasure was ours (2022) and The Voice in the Headphones (2020), both published by Duke University Press. Itnrview: Stephen Prina. p. 62 Megan Nolan is…

WHILE SCOUTING A SEWAGE-CONTAMINATED RIVER in her home town of Oaxaca - as part of a performance linked to her research on plague and disease in urban contexts from a biopolitical perspective, artist Berenice Olmedo came across an object hanging on the fence of a thrift store. Surrounded by washing machines and other appliances was the lower-body orthosis that was to become Olga (2018). Olmedo had never seen anything like it. The owner of the store explained that it was a device used by children and adolescents who had suffered from polio. The year was 2012, and Olmedo, then a student, returned home to borrow money from her mother so she could buy it. ‘As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to help her walk; recalls Olmedo,…

DAVID GRUBBS In your upcoming exhibition ‘A Lick and a Promise’ at the Museum of Modern Art [MoMA] in New York, musical performances outnumber pieces that we would conventionally describe as ‘objects’. Can you talk about this balance of works, and how performance came to dominate the exhibition? STEPHEN PRINA The show's curator, Stuart Comer, approached me quite a long time ago with the prospect of making a survey exhibition focusing on my musical works, and no one had ever proposed that to me before. I thought this could lead to something distinctive and useful. I trust Stuart, so I went along with it. I've always thought of my musical performances as piano-based and very much related to my practice as a visual artist. But at the time, around 1980-82,…

Since 2021, I've been composing a synthetic self-potrait titled Paul’. It doesn't portray me visually, like a painting or a photograph. Instead, it writes and speaks like me. I've trained AI frameworks with 25 years of my data, in the form of published writings, interviews and information about my work. I call Paul’ synthetic because it blends machine and human data - the’ symbol stands for ‘prime’, which in mathematics denotes a derivative of some original value. I didn't set out to make a self-portrait. I wanted to write a computer program that could answer emails from galleries about installing artworks in exhibitions, or from journalists wanting quotes for articles. I wondered if it was possible to create a digital assistant, so I'd have more time to pursue what I…

Austria HALLE FUR KUNST Steiermark Graz, Burgring 2, 8010 Tel. +43 316 740 084 www.halle-fuer-kunst.at Instagram @hallefuerkunststeiermark Facebook @hallefuerkunststeiermark #HfkSt Louise Giovanelli through 28 September Evelyn Plaschg through 28 September Neue Galerie Graz, Universalmuseum Joanneum Graz, Joanneumsviertel, 8010 Tel. +43 316 80179100 www.neuegaleriegraz.at Instagram @Joanneumsviertel Facebook @Joanneumsviertel #NeueGalerieGraz ‘Freedom Was an Episode (tbc)’ through 7 September ‘Solids in Revolution’ through 21 September Gerhard Riihm ‘still even now’ through 5 October ‘But there are unspeakable things - The painter Wolfgang Hollegha’ through 2 November ‘Your Silence Will Not Protect You’ 3 October - 8 February 2026 ‘Selection. Highlights from the Collection’ 29 November - 31 December Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg, Mirabellplatz 2, 5020 Tel: +43 662 881 3930 www.ropac.net Instagram @thaddaeusropac Salzburg Halle, Vilniusstrasse 13 A-5020 Daniel Richter ‘Mit elben Birnen’ through…

Sometimes rules are made to be broken, at least according to Paul Niedermayer. The protagonist of ‘Wildlife’ in this gem of an exhibition at The Wig, which comprises nine small-scale, archival pigment prints that purposefully undermine the rules of wildlife photography, is a ladybird. Niedermayer is known for her engagement with the methodologies that shape image-making, and the subversive meanings that derive from strategies of restaging or reorganizing certain genres. One of wildlife photography's key tenets is to take images of creatures in their natural habitats. So Niedermayer's decision to order a batch of 200 ladybird eggs to her home, which she proceeded to store in the fridge until they were needed, certainly upends this field's typical approach. She let the eggs hatch so that the ladybirds could then roam…

In a column on the artist-as-DJ for this issue, McKenzie Wark observes that mobile phones have ‘tilted’ the media environment towards flat - and flattening - images and video, often accompanied by ‘execrable sound’. What can artists do to oppose the ‘miniature image’? she asks. The new ‘great aesthetic project might be to counter it with an entirely different mix of sensory impressions’. The variety of that project, across sound and vision, is on full display in th is issue of frieze. Our columns, where Wark's piece sits, are devoted to experiments in art and music. Johanna Hedva writes of how astrology can teach us to listen to the strange, influential ‘music of the spheres’; Lauren Rosati explores the sonic templates of Jennie C. Jones; Simon Wu looks back on…

I THINK ABOUT SOUND both sculpturally and architecturally. Sound has a long relationship with art objects, going back to the intonarumori (noise machines) conceived and constructed in 1913 by the Italian futurist artist Luigi Russolo. My installation for the Cantor Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) in New York - a trio of sculptural forms inspired by string instruments and a floor-based ‘conductor’, collectively titled Ensemble (2025)- draws on this lineage of sound sculpture. For my solo exhibition, ‘A Line When Broken Begins Again’, which opens this month at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, I'm presenting a new version of RPM (2018), the ambient audio collage that I first showed at The Glass House in New Canaan. There has always been a debate…

THERE IS SOMETHING OF THE DEEP-SEA CREATURE about the work of Pol Taburet - those organisms that generate their own light in oceanic darkness, navigating by bioluminescence where conventional vision fails. Scientists once assumed colour vision was useless in such depths, too far for sunlight to penetrate beneath. But research has shown that bioluminescence serves a dual purpose: a defence mechanism, used to camouflage, distract and confuse, and a navigational aid in that inky darkness. Taburet operates with similar logic in his paintings, starting from pitch-black backgrounds before building luminous figures with alcohol-diluted pigments and precise airbrush work. These spectral beings appear to emit their own radiance, inhabiting a boundless space and time, where architectural elements - doors, windows, skylights - shelter or deliberately evict, vacillating between thresholds for presence…

Upon entering the studio of South Korean artist Lee Bul, my eye is immediately drawn to an array of sculptures, most of which resemble cyborg-inspired appendages, suspended in mid-air from wires at various heights. At the centre of the studio is a pair of oversized abstract figures: two versions of a single monumental sculpture that Lee is in the midst of developing. Spread across several tables nearby are a variety of maquettes and miscellaneous components of extant sculptures being prepared for display at her forthcoming mid-career survey exhibition, ‘Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now’, which opens this month at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, before travelling to M+ in Hong Kong in 2026. It takes nearly two hours to complete my tour of Lee's studio, which encompasses five…

New York 555 West 25th st, New York, 10001, United States +1 929 705-3964 usa@galerie-makowski.com Paris 320 Rue Saint-Honore, Paris, 75001, France +33 63 176-7196 paris@galerie-makowski.com Hong Kong Hollywood Road, Hong Kong, China china@galerie-makowski.com info@galerie-makowski.com WWW.GALERIE-MAKOWSKI.COM Founded in 2012 as an extension of Makowski Rusa Consulting, Gallery Makowski has grown from its Berlin roots to locations in Paris, New York's prestigious Chelsea Art District, and Hong Kong. Marking a major milestone in its curatorial journey, Gallery Makowski now presents works by global icons, induding Banksy, David Datuna, and Ed Heck. With participation in over 51 international art fairs-such as Art Miami and ART021 Shanghai the gallery has established itself as a prominent force on the global art stlge. Known for its bold and diverse programming across painting, sculpture, and graphk…

Canada Daniel Faria Gallery Toronto, 188 St Helens Avenue, M6H 4A1 Tel. + 1 416 538 1880 www.danielfariagallery.com ‘Caught between the tongue and the taste’ through 13 September June Clark 18 September - 1 November MKG127 Toronto, 1445 Dundas Street West, M6J 1 Y7 Tel. +1 647 435 7682 www.mkg127.com Instagram @mkg127 Dave Dyment & Roula Partheniou ‘Forest For The Trees’ 13 September - 11 October Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA) Toronto, 158 Sterling Rd, ON M6R 2B7 www.moca.ca Contact the gallery for information. United States AlmineRech New York, 39 East 78th Street, 2nd Floor, 10075 www.alminerech.com New York, Tribeca, 361 Broadway, 10013 Timothy Curtis 11 September - 25 October Chloe Wise 18 September - 25 October Erik Lindman & Augustus Thompson 18 September - 25 October Galerie Buchholz…

In 2022, Jina Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman stopped by authorities in Tehran for allegedly not wearing the hijab to government standards, died after being severely beaten whilst in police custody. Amini's death sparked the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ protests, calling for an end to the systemic oppression of women and girls within contemporary Iran. At Auto Italia, Iranian artist Nazanin Noori's first UK exhibition, ‘THE ECHO OF PROTEST IS DISTANT TO THE PROTEST’, responds to this recent political history. Al the front of the gallery, THE PARTY OF GOD/WELL DID WE LIVE (2024) features the Farsi phrase معذرت (I'm sorry) in yellow acrylic against a green industrial tarpaulin curtain, inverting the colours of the Hezbollah militant group's flag. With this work, Noori posits the notion that despots might…

Go to any national gallery in Europe and, in the wood-panelled trenches of baroqueera painting, you are likely to find a work by Trophime Bigot. For 30 years in the early 17th century, Bigot divided his time between France and Italy, depicting figures illuminated only by candlelight. These are strange, sensual works - largely overlooked by scholars and critics today - in which every event in history and religion occurs at night, from the Descent from the Cross to the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. Every time I see an exhibition by TM Davy, whose ‘Tine Mara’ is now on view at Carl Freedman in Margate, I think of Bigot. Since his 2014 solo show at Eleven Rivington in New York, Davy has painted the enigmatic faces of friends, fellow artists…

‘Unleashing the Sins of Sculpture’ reimagines sin as a means of disrupting the patriarchal narratives shaping the infrastructures of power and value, historical memory and aesthetic visibility. Co-curated by Cristina Vasilescu and Georgia Tidorescu, the exhibition brings together works by 19 contemporary Romanian women artists to offer a counterpoint to traditional sculpture - one that operates through instability, abjection and embodied subjectivity to expose points of rupture within the male-centred canon. Once the headquarters of the centralized communist press, the vast building now occupied by Scanteia+ looms as a ruinous colossus haunted by its ideological past. Erupting from its tiled walls is Larisa Si tar's We Belong Together (2024), a faux mirror of concrete-dipped foam sprouting thick tentacles, which kitschifies the austere monumentality associated with Soviet-era brutal ism. Juxtaposing the…

In a 2024 interview for De Singe!, British multidisciplinary artist Anthea Hamilton described her work as ‘an invitation to view things differently’. Her latest show, ‘Soft You’, at Fondazione Memmo in Rome, extends this proposition by creating a choreographed environment- featuring sculptural installations, pungent aromas and photographic works - that initiates a dialogue with the Eternal City itself. Taking its title from the closing monologue of William Shakespeare's Othello (c.1603)- in which the titular character, a Black general living in predominantly white Venice, is destroyed by the prevailing racist ideologies that cast him as a lawless and monstrous outsider - the exhibition skilfully intertwines questions of race, gender, domesticity and collective memory. In his impassioned final speech, Othello asks the audience for a moment of reckoning: ‘Soft you, a word…

We speak about glaciers as if they were the bodies of animals. Snout. Foot. Calve. This corporeal lexicon doesn't just hint at a vulnerability already evident in the blistering rate of glacial retreat on a warming planet. It also suggests a vitality that is warm-blooded and mammalian: kindred. I imagine that the people who first ascribed these poetically ill-fitting words to masses of ice were a bit in love with them - or at least aware that their ecosystems were among those that glaciers help sustain. A like-minded tenderness - and metaphorical promiscuity- pervades Ohan Breiding's ‘Belly of a Glacier’ at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, with Williams College Museum of Art. The Swiss-American artist grew up near the Rhone Glacier, which has retreated by half…

In Rachel Cusk's 2014 novel Outline, the protagonist becomes known primarily through her dialogue with the people around her - strangers, friends and family - rather than direct characterization. At Soft Network, an exhibition devoted to the work and archives of Turkish-American photographer Sheyla Baykal enacts a similar sleight of hand through Baykal's own photographs, archival ephemera and portraits by other artists. We come to know the East Village artist and ‘vital fringe figure’, as The New York Times critic Holland Cotter described her in 2000, through her community: a fuzzy, bejewelled outline. From the mid-1960s to her death in 1997, Baykal was best known for her portraits of now-famous downtown Manhattan figures, including Frank O'Hara, Marsha P. Johnson and Willem de Kooning. One of Baykal's most iconic photographs might…

‘The Plantation Plot’ at ILHAM Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, debunks the myth that the successful cultivation of land for crops is only possible through the rigid order and monoculture perpetuated by colonial plantation systems. Assembling wide-ranging work from 28 artists and collectives across Southeast Asia and beyond, the exhibition poses an intriguing question: which mediums and aesthetics most effectively enable historically suppressed narratives to irrupt the complicated discourse surrounding plantation legacy? The subjugated have long employed mimicry as a means of speaking truth to power. Here, by creating objects that reflect colonial aesthetic trends, artists reveal how such styles emerged, in fact, from plantation exploitation. This strategy is exemplified by Brazilian artist Noara Quintana's series ‘Belle Époque of the Tropics’ (2021), which unpacks how the Amazon rubber boom (1879-1912) heralded both…

WHEN I FELL IN LOVE FOR THE FIRST TIME, I recall thinking how strange it was that I should say the same words to my boyfriend as I did to my father: I love you. What were these words that were so capacious they could relay a person's respect for a father, devotion to a lover and appreciation for a friend? They seemed too broad to place my trust in; yet they were the only words I had come across aside from those of violence - that were imbued with such potency. They were the most practical example of how language can act as a kind of everyday magic, transforming situations once spoken aloud. Louise Bourgeois's 2007 drypoint etching, I Love You, is hardly typical of her work. A sheet…

SHOT OVER 12 DAYS, the rousing short The House Is Black (1963) by the Iranian feminist poet Forugh Farrokhzad, features a merciless procession of tortured human flesh: eyes clouded with cataracts, disfigured faces, amputated or scabby limbs. It challenges viewers to confront what they'd rather shun: namely, the suffering at the Bababaghi leprosy colony in the mountain city of Tabriz. Farrokhzad courted controversy throughout her career, until her tragic death from a car accident at the age of 36. Her confessional poems, published in the mid1950s, jolted the milieu of Persian literature with their brazen sensuality and directness. Married at 16, she came to view nuptial life as a cage and saw liberation as a bird in flight - metaphors that recur in her poetry, as well as in The…

‘I DECIDED TO DEVELOP A SERIES OF WORKS that were closely linked to my environment,’ the Brazilian artist Gervane de Paula told me in a recent interview. ‘Like other artists, I embraced my region - I didn't want to migrate to big cities like Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo - this is where I make art and see the world.’ Born in Cuiabá, capital of the state of Mato Grosso, De Paula has spent over four decades constructing a fiercely local, deeply critical visual language that speaks to the marginalization of both his home state and his Black identity within the Brazilian art world. Mato Grosso is nestled in the Central-West region of Brazil and is home to the Pantanal wetlands and a dense mosaic of Indigenous nations. It…

The images are as fascinating as the anecdotes. In one black and white photograph from 1978, nine women are gathered outdoors in sunny Bukhara. The caption reveals that the women are ‘participants of the Tashkent Festival for Asian, African and Latin American Cinema’, which was held annually from 1968 to 1988. Like the many myths that perpetuate the festival's legend, these images of transcultural sociability document glimpses of what unfolded at the sidelines of an event held, in the words of its slogan, to promote ‘peace, social progress and freedom of peoples’. In late 2023, with the help of our brilliant colleagues at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, we began working on ‘Destination: Tashkent’ - a film festival, public programme and publication project that celebrated and critically…

Moments of heavy silence suffuse Pol Taburet's debut German solo show, ‘The Burden of Papa Tonnerrc’, at Schinkel Pavilion in Berlin - the second in a threepart series of exhibitions that began in March at the Pabellón de los Hexáagonos in Madrid and will conclude at the Bienal de Sao Paulo later this year. An assembly of six bronze heads (Papa and Soldier, all works 2025), with pinched facial features and sealed mouths, rest atop rectangular plinths. They are encircled by a series of four large-scale paintings depicting ghoullike figures engaged in spiritual ceremonies. The exhibition text introduces the legend of Papa Tonnerre, a mute figure weighed down by the secrets of others, who gains speech through a deal with a witch. Unable to bear the emotional burden of his…

Xanthc Scout Lardner-Burke's exhibition at SMAC Gallery is modest in scale yet reflects the artist's ambition to give agency in her artistic process to error and accident. Installed in a single room, the show brings together three discrete bodies of work: five large-format paintings on polysatin, a suite of nine rice-paper works encased in resin and a series of eight fabric sculptures. Her monumental paintings dominate the space. Made using ink, liquid pigment and silk paint on a glossy synthetic fabric, shimmering, pink-keyed works such as Red Line (2025) balance intention with accident. As detailed in a statement for her show ‘EXIT STRATEGY’ at 99 Loop Gallery in 2024, Lardner-Burke purpose-fully waters down her paints, occasioning spills, runs and pools of colour. This methodology creates a gestural vitality in her…

A 1988 essay by curator Sidra Stich quotes German conceptual artist Rosemarie Trockel stating that ‘inconsistency’ is one of the ‘constants’ in her work. This quality is front and centre in her New York double-header, ‘Material’ at Spriüith Magers and ‘The Kiss’ at Gladstone Gallery - exhibitions which, combining varied media and forms with a biting sense of humour, exemplify the artist's decades-long exploration of the vital inconsistency of the art object. There is no prescribed order in which to view these shows, but it felt natural to begin at the Manhattan outpost of Sprüith Magers, whose co-founder, Monika Sprüth, first exhibited Trockel's work in 1983. The gallery's walls are painted a deep chocolate brown to match the hardwood flooring. (This strategy continues at Gladstone, where the grey-painted walls echo…

We know we're in a haunted house: Slug Sex (2025) - a video projection of two encircling slugs - is our first sight in ‘The Garden of Loved Ones’. Its cast light catches in the cobwebs of the gallery's darker corners. The slug who deigns to top pushes out a goopy blue phallus that runs the length of its body, slugs being a hermaphroditic species. And this being a Richard Hawkins joint. Around the bend hang the artist's 2012 ‘Ankoku’ collages, exhibited in that year's Whitney Biennial. These compositions - hastily cut archival materials and notes taped intuitively beside printouts and calligraphy - mimic the notebooks of Tatsumi Hijikata, founder of the postwar Japanese dance form Butoh. Their posthumous publication disclosed how Hijikata approached choreography with a collage-like glom, pasting…