Tabla de contenidos para Issue 239 - November/December 2023 en Frieze

⟶ Re-evaluations: Sore Feeling, p. 28 ⟶ 1,500 Words: Trance States, p. 90 ⟶ Profile: Ali Cherri, p. 56 ⟶ Re-evaluations: Beautiful Experiments, p. 27 ⟶ Re-evaluations: The Prophet, p. 24 ⟶ 1,500 Words: Trance States, p. 90 ⟶ Re-evaluations: Taking Account, p. 21 ⟶ Reviews: Pedro Reyes, p. 130 ⟶ Re-evaluations: Where Are You Now?, p. 31…

THE ART CRITIC CATHERINE MILLET’S first memoir, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., was published in France in 2001, and had already sold more than 300,000 copies by the time it appeared in English the following year. There were diverse critical responses to Millet’s unashamed account of her life of impressive sexual liberty. In The New Yorker, Judith Thurman complained that Millet’s seemingly blithe confession was ‘an act of self-mortification more hard-core than any in the text’. Jenny Diski, writing in the London Review of Books, questioned Millet’s claim to be without guilt: ‘You cheer her on and hope it’s true. It would be nice if someone had got away scot-free.’ As a lapsed Catholic and apprentice critic, I liked the book and said so in print. I remember having dinner…

WASSAN AL-KHUDHAIRI This September saw the opening of ‘A Solo Exhibition’ at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, featuring new and recent works including video, sculpture, painting and works on paper. Central to the exhibition is a new iteration of Hum [2020] – a multichannel musical composition and sound installation. Originally commissioned for Lahore Biennale 02, you conceived it in the wake of nationwide student solidarity marches in Pakistan against cuts to the education budget and violence against women on campuses. Can you share more about the context of making this work? HAJRA WAHEED The marches erupted just after my site visit to Lahore in November 2019 and coincided with a massive mobilization against the Citizenship Amendment Act across the border in India, which instituted discrimination against Muslims and other minorities. Both…

In Pedro Reyes’s first exhibition with Lisson Gallery in Los Angeles, centuries-old artistic practices are carefully interwoven with quietly insistent calls to political action. A new body of volcanic basalt sculptures stands surrounded by paintings on amate – a form of paper made from tree bark using an indigenous technique. Though the work’s hybrid abstract and figurative forms cull from Mesoamerican visual languages, Reyes’s sustained concern with non-violent activism brings it into the precarious present moment of global hostility. A number of Reyes’s sculptures – especially Tsontekotl (2022), with its smooth, extra-terrestrial-like bust atop a jagged mound – are reminiscent of the early Olmec colossal heads (c.1,200–500 BCE) that were made of the same volcanic basalt. Its polished symmetry, however, deviates from such ancient Mesoamerican representations, and Reyes’s stylized skull…

You can smell Florian Krewer’s paintings before you get a close look at them, so thickly layered are they with oils. It’s not hard to imagine the scent of sweat wafting from their roiling, nocturnal scenes of male camaraderie and confrontation. The painter’s first US solo museum exhibition, ‘everybody rise’, opens with several such works, completed not long after he graduated from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he was mentored by Peter Doig. The influence of the older artist is easy to see in Krewer’s de-skilled figuration, submerged beneath raw, youthful aggression. The connection is often stressed in press accounts of Krewer’s ascent from housepainter in the working-class suburbs of North Rhine-Westphalia to art-market darling, such that it’s tempting to approach his display in one of North America’s toniest small-town museums…

The Bowery is a mélange of Manhattans. A romanesque revival YMCA building, commissioned by business magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt II for his railroad workers in 1884, it became home to John Giorno, William S. Burroughs and a dozen other writers and artists. A few blocks south, a beaux arts triumphal arch marks the bridge between Chinatown and Brooklyn. The Bowery Mission nearly abuts the New Museum, while foundational institutions – the Theatre, the Ballroom, the Poetry Club – are scattered pell-mell among bum-chic boutiques like Supreme and John Varvatos. All along the avenue, stylish yet banal condos and rooftop lounges encroach on the one-time skid row – a Disneyland of grit. Through the second-storey window of Helena Anrather gallery, Alix Vernet’s exhibition ‘Street Casts’ looms over this bricolage. Vernet’s art draws…

In The Agony of Eros (2017), philosopher Byung-Chul Han avers that ‘Eros manifests itself as the revolutionary yearning for an entirely different way of loving and another kind of society.’ For Han, Eros – in its embrace of unknown and elusive Others – is transformative: a necessary antidote to society’s prevailing narcissism and consumerism. ‘EROS’ – a group exhibition at Seoul’s P21 gallery that presents paintings, works on paper and installations by seven artists – revisits the gravitas and ideals of Han’s non-materialistic theory. The exhibited artworks all obscure unfurling scenes of intimacy, spoiling what Han calls the ‘display value’ of amorous bodies, which he likens to purchasable commodities. Works such as Eunsil Lee’s Midnight (2017) thwart prying, voracious gazes to prompt a more intent spectatorship of intimacy, sexuality and…

‘I am a sculptor, not a sculptress,’ artist Wanda Czełkowska told gallerist Ewa Opalka in an unpublished interview conducted between 2014–19. ‘I am beyond male and female. [Being a sculptor is] a form of existence.’ Working largely during the second half of the 20th century in an era dominated by monumental public sculpture designed by men – whether in socialist Poland, where she was based, or in the West – defining herself as an artist living outside of the patriarchy might seem like wishful thinking. Yet, this deftly curated show at Muzeum Susch reveals Czełkowska to be a larger-than-life character who consistently punctured expectations. As the exhibition title, ‘Art Is Not Rest’, suggests, there was a political dimension to Czełkowska’s practice. Born in 1930, the artist avoided being forced to…

‘Who can tell’, begins anthropologist Tim Ingold’s exhibition text for Nicolas Party’s ‘Cretaceous’, ‘of what the sleeping baby dreams?’ Currently on display across The Modern Institute’s Aird’s Lane and Bricks Space, the show – Party’s sixth solo outing at the gallery – comprises 12 works. The first of these is a sleeping infant, titled simply Baby (2023), which, for Ingold, ‘holds the key to this exhibition’, symbolizing an innocent, instinctive connection to the natural world. It’s the only human figure in the show: after it come four enormous pastel works depicting Mountains and Waterfalls (all 2023), three smaller oil-on-copper images of Mountains and Dinosaur (all 2023) and, in the final room, a trio of pastel and oil depictions of a forest fire (Red Forest, 2023 and 2022). In opening an…

A year ago, OpenAI released ChatGPT – you’ve probably used it, and you’ve more than likely read about how artificial intelligence has the potential to improve your life, destroy the world or, in a very 21st century way, do both at the same time. At the heart of this issue of frieze sits a conversation between artists, writers and curators that assesses how we have absorbed the shocks of this technology and devised new ways of using it to advance longstanding questions about authorship and human creativity. Whether the machine-led apocalypse is nigh or still in the long grass (at the base of a seawall in a flood zone) remains to be seen. Either way, AI has already begun permanently to alter our perceptions of originality and caused us to…

IT WAS DURING THE 2000S that I realized Jeff Koons was, and perhaps continues to be, the most religious artist that the United States has ever produced. If people consider Koons at all, they tend to think of him as a pop artist. But his fascination with working tells another part of his story. No one I recall in contemporary art makes a fetish about how hard they work the way Koons does. He openly talks about the ridiculous amounts of effort it takes to make a piece, because it must be flawless. It’s as if there’s a natural and abiding relationship between what’s beautiful above all and the endless labouring it takes for anything beautiful to appear. Doesn’t this strike you as the aesthetic of the Protestant work ethic? What…

BEN DAVIS How are you all feeling about the new wave and conversation around generative AI and LLMs [large language models] like ChatGPT? Are you positive, negative, some mix of the two or do you think it’s just a flash in the pan? MIKE PEPI I am of the mindset that, despite the venture capital-fuelled hype, LLMs are essentially just a parlour trick. They will never have true sentience or creativity. And I think it’s very important for anyone working in a creative field and feeling anxious about AI disrupting their output to just temper some of those utopian prognostications that come from the people who put these things out. I think we’re at the very tip of the hype cycle and soon we’re going to see that we prefer to…

A far-right swing is imminent in Argentinian politics, as Javier Milei – a presidential candidate who likens himself to Wolverine from X-Men (1963–ongoing) – is likely to take office this December. Despite the exhausting uncertainty of this situation, however, the country at large – and the city of Buenos Aires, in particular – is brimming with life, with a recent spike in consumption fuelled by the Argentine peso’s rapid depreciation. Artist Mónica Millán, who came of age in the 1980s at the height of a similar crisis, makes artworks that appear somewhat detached from this reality, yet establish a profound and sensible dialogue with art-historical genealogies. Her excellent current solo exhibition at W-galería, ‘Barroco Ao po’i’, curated by Carla Barbero, presents works made in collaboration with local women embroiderers from…

Competing in a sport as dangerous as horse racing can not only be life-changing but, in some cases, life-ending. In Sarah Miska’s exhibition ‘High Stakes’, hyper-realistic acrylic paintings draw on the adrenaline-inducing event to explore risk, reward and control. Images of graphic and energetic moments the artist collects through digital research and social media are replicated, enhanced and edited, resulting in canvases that are at once intimate and engulfing, detailing moments too dangerous to get close to and too compelling to look away from. Each work in the exhibition depicts some facet of a horse race – from The Starting Gate to Post Position (both 2023) – immersing the viewer in the scene’s theatricality and striking costumes, and offering peeks behind the curtain. Brilliantly lit and installed in Night Gallery’s…

While studying dance at Trinity Laban Conservatoire in London, I took modules in choreology – the discipline of movement analysis – focusing on the notation system and theories of 20th century choreographer Rudolf Laban. My fellow students and I often questioned the contemporary relevance of these techniques, given that we could film ourselves on our smartphones during rehearsals. Our teachers assured us, however, that Laban’s notation system captures choreographic intention more clearly than any video and can be used to facilitate new ways of analyzing and devising movement. Nowhere is this more evident than in the work of Israeli dance composer and textile artist Noa Eshkol whose ‘movement notations’ are currently the subject of a titular exhibition at Berlin’s neugerriem-schneider. Originally trained as a pianist, Eshkol, who died in 2007,…

Anri Sala’s latest exhibition explores the architecture of divine time. The show presents a stratigraphic reimagining of the heavens that draws on the myths humans create about themselves. Fragments of both are here repurposed and reassembled into sublime renditions of non-human temporalities. In two cycles of murals, ‘Surface to Air’ and ‘Legenda Aurea Inversa’ (all works 2023), Sala merges slithers of mother of pearl, marble and volcanic rock with intonaco – plaster bound with pigment while still wet. The first mural cycle is a series of cloud vistas, as seen from above. They depict early mornings or late afternoons, the hues of differing twilights playing amongst the aerial structures far below and into the distance. The second cycle is a quotational redeployment of figurative and architectural details from Piero della…

It takes a special kind of sensibility to make peat bogs sexy. Traversing performance, poetry, film, installation and site-specific mark-making, Rabindranath X Bhose’s solo exhibition, ‘DANCE IN THE SACRED DOMAIN’, consists of a single work that connects queer erotics to ritualistic magic, transness, transformation and death within the dark, squishy ecologies of bogland in Scotland. In various cultures, bogs have been understood as sacred, portal-like spaces. In Scotland, as capitalism replaced feudalism, vast swathes were enclosed, drained and replaced with sheep or forestry in the name of productivity. The dwindling peat bogs that remain are therefore reminders of alternative, pre-industrial relationships between people and the land. Bhose’s work prompts me to wonder whether the bog might be read as a site of resistance: not only materially, against the straight lines…

Dressed in loosely fitting black clothes and a denim jacket, Paris-based Lebanese artist Ali Cherri glides through the Oriental Antiquity galleries of the Louvre like a dancer engaged in a complex choreographywith the throngs of museum visitors around him. We stop before a relief panel depicting the Tree of Life taken from the Palace of King Sargon II at Dur-Sharrukin (c.713–706 BCE). Cherri has been studying this panel for several months in preparation for his forthcoming exhibition at the Giacometti Foundation, Paris, in January. The artist pulls out his phone to show me the progress being made on a 3D interpretation that will be the centrepiece of his show. ‘It is the first time that I will be working in bronze,’ he explains excitedly, swiping past images of the scale…

‘Have you seen Joy Ride?’ my friend Julie texts me. When I moved away from Brooklyn last year to go to graduate school in New Haven, I’d wake up feeling listless and randomly anxious as I checked my text messages. I missed both my friends and the city, realizing in their absence that they had come to constitute my self-conception. Without them, I had to assert that energy myself, and it made me tired and self-conscious. ‘It’s not just you,’ Julie had said earlier in the summer. ‘After you left, more people moved in with their partners. It’s not the same as living together: you have to be a lot more intentional about spending time together.’ We were surfing at the Rockaways, bobbing up and down in the salt water,…

Entering the gallery, I am greeted by the verso of an artwork: What a Preventer of Life-Loss 5 (all works 2023) rests atop a pedestal, its thin extrusions of wood guiding me into the space. Comprised of painted ends and rough edges set at staggered lengths and covered in written marks, the sculpture divulges the history of the discarded scraps from which it is formed. Viewed from the front, these fragments all terminate on a single plane, revealing the complex patterning of this seemingly chaotic assemblage. By foregrounding this work, the exhibition establishes from the outset that material memory and thoughtful accumulation is of utmost importance to Ato Ribeiro. The entrance is bookended by two wall-mounted works also in wood – Communication Coming In and Nevermind; Forget It – which,…

In 2003, Brandi Twilley took a leave from college due to severe depression and insomnia. Upon her return to Oklahoma, her family’s rural home caught on fire, forcing them to move to a nearby city, where Twilley began working at a local grocery store, Crest Foods. During her time there, Twilley made sketches of the store and her co-workers. Nearly 20 years later, while recovering from Lyme disease during the pandemic, she revisited these images and began a series of 40 oil paintings, a selection of which are on view at Sargent’s Daughters. In the ‘Crest Foods’ series (2020–23), Twilley portrays her previous occupation through a profoundly humanist lens, acknowledging moments of hardship without dwelling on ideas of trauma. In doing so, she calls upon the past to make visible…

In the glacial landscape of Greenland, global warming has caused the ice that once covered 80 percent of the island to melt, with the dog sledges used by trappers now more frequently seen bearing tourists. Conceived by Greenlandic artist Jessie Kleemann for her first solo institutional exhibition in Denmark, The sledge on the way (2023) is an oversized sleigh bound with vibrant cords, which pays homage to a way of life that is evolving as the ice melts. Yet, Kleemann does not romanticize a Greenlandic identity that no longer exists. Instead, her work is imbued with moments of tragicomedy – like the sledge’s glow-up – that reflect the complexities of life in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) and its relationship to former coloniser, Denmark. Born in north-western Greenland, Kleemann moved to Denmark…

‘Interflow’ is a tale of three parts: the works in the exhibition comprise chapters in a narrative that leads us from undefined entities through alchemical transformations to concrete forms. Each of the nine featured artists explores the building blocks of our world and, while overt depictions of the body are absent, the human will to construct and intervene is omnipresent. The show opens with Peppi Bottrop’s Dotv (2022–23), a large canvas with expressive black and copper lashings in acrylic paint, charcoal and graphite. Its marks suggest unseen biological structures, perhaps underground networks of tangled roots or microneural pathways in the brain. Bottrop invites us to lose ourselves in its abstraction. Opposite, Jeff Wall’s photograph Trap set (2021) captures a wild tangle of thin branches and a murky woodland stream…