Indice dei contenuti per Issue 247 - November/December 2024 in Frieze

BEFORE MY CALL with Allison Janae Hamilton, I put on a Valerie June record. The singer-songwriter's Tennessee whine curls like a shawl around my shoulders, a familiar voice casing in the subtle sounds of kinfolk memory. In a 2021 interview with Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor for The Bitter Southerner, Hamilton mused: 'Everyone in my family talks with a Tennessee-specific twang. When I go to their church, when I'm home, the music is more Tennessee [… Valerie's] music and her voice is just so Tennessee to me. That Western flatlands style.' In her artistic practice, spanning sculpture, installation, photography and film, Hamilton similarly sounds out a constellated landscape - articulating the distinct pitches of ancestral relation across time-space. Born in Kentucky, raised in Florida, with maternal roots in Tennessee's rural flatlands, Hamilton treats…

DURING SUMMERS GROWING UP, I'd visit my cousins in Wyoming, where we'd do a lot of labouring outside or in the workshop. Country music was always on the radio. That lifestyle has always rung true for me, and country music - written by people, for people - caters to the blue-collar way of life. There are some who are interested in and want to pursue country music who didn't really grow up 'country', but I would say 95 percent of people who sing about getting their hands dirty really did. Farming, ranching and raising animals is hard work. It's difficult to fake it. You can hear quickly when someone isn't authentic to the sound that they're trying to create. Country music is a part of who I am. I've been…

Geraldine Javier's Amerika (2024) greets me as I enter 'Soft Fantasy/Hard Reality' at Silverlens in New York, a show constellating cross-disciplinary work by seven artists from underrepresented communities bearing ties with the larger Asian diaspora. The exhibition opens with Javier's orange tapestry: a tribute to Seattle's 'transit fairy' Pauline Van Senus, who is often spotted, adorned with plastic sunflowers, cleaning up trash around the city's bus stops. In this devotional piece, Van Senus is depicted in a bed of blooming, hand-embroidered sunflowers. A set of plush red curtains in the gallery leads to a side room, where the drapes are replicated onscreen in Sin Wai Kin's video Irreconcilable Differences (2020). Sin plays two hyper-femme characters, staging a dialogue between them. The platinum-haired 'Jessica Rabbit' on the left makes garbled, nonsensical…

'ON DA DREAM', the title of Vy Trinh's solo exhibition at Galerie Quynh, is an approximate homophone of Honda Dream, a motorbike model formerly produced by the Japanese automobile manufacturer. The Honda Dream quickly became a symbol of newfound economic mobility in Vietnam, where, per the exhibition text, the bike was strategically introduced around 1992, following the Dôi Môi ('renovation') market reforms initiated by the Southeast Asian nation in 1986. The 19 sculptures on view are all inspired by the aspirational velocity of the Honda Dream. Forgoing the fastidious preservation and display of the vintage vehicle as a precious antique, more than half of the works incorporate salvaged mechanical parts found in the Dream and other Honda motorbikes. Upon entering the gallery, visitors encounter 'Fast 'n Secure' (all works 2024),…

It felt especially poignant to see Jacopo Benassi's solo exhibition, 'Sàlvati Salvàti' (Save yourself, saved), on the day that hundreds of synchronized explosions in Lebanon and Syria killed at least 12 people and injured thousands more. Near the gallery entrance is a makeshift barricade of metal scaffolding pipes filled with dozens of overlapping framed photographs from Benassi's archive (Barricata, Barricade, 2018—24). Some feature images of gutted construction sites or wrecked nature; in others, partially concealed faces, animals and legs peer out. Sandbags line the foot of the barricade; at the top, plaster-cast hands are ready to hurl absurd objects —a slipper or a foot — at the audience. Two silk banners suspended from thorny acacia branches flank this construction: each features a lone chela of a crab and a lobster…

'The violence doesn't wholly define Black worlds because of [the complex nature of] geography and landscape,' Hamilton responds. 'It's also a spiritual space. It's a place of refuge. The hush harbour. It's the cutaway places that are sites of beauty and culture-making and world-building as well. In my work, I try to show how it's both/and. You have a sense of haunting, but there's also pleasure. There's sort of an ethereal, spiritual quality to the land because it's been many things - a healing modality, a container. I think a Black sense of place would be just as complex as Black people are.' Hamilton's creative process reflects this very complexity - her understanding of homeplace is nuanced, simultaneous, multi-channelled. Oftentimes, she enlists family members to feature in her photo and…

Liliana Porter rarely alters the found toys and figurines that comprise her extensive collection, viewing them as complete in their own right. Across the decades, the Buenos Aires-born, New York-based artist has staged these objects - often nostalgic mementos of mass production - in photographs, videos and large-scale assemblages. Her exhibition, 'The Task', at Dia Bridgehampton features this familiar cast - Elvis Presley busts, Mickey Mouse statuettes, porcelain dolls - alongside video documentation of her 2018 play, THEM, and significant photographic works from the 1970s, reaffirming the artist's conviction that physical objects and their representations are equally 'real'. Sprawling across two plinths that line opposing gallery walls, The Task (2024) is the exhibition's eponymous centrepiece. The new commission was conceived as an extension of Porter's 'Trabajo forzado' (Forced Labour) series,…

A few weeks after the UK General Election in July, I sat in the library, staring over a stranger's shoulder as he watched a video of the Conservative Party MP Suella Braverman. Devoid of her voice, Braverman appeared almost amiable in the footage, making it easy to forget the damaging rhetoric she espoused while in office. At a conference in 2022, for instance, she described it as her 'dream' to send those seeking asylum in the UK to Rwanda - a controversial deportation policy peddled by the previous government. Prem Sahib's unnerving performance for Edinburgh Art Festival, Alleus (2024), doesn't risk creating the same ameliorating effect for Braverman. The artist takes a recording of the former home secretary's incendiary speech on the Illegal Migration Bill (2023), booming and warping it…

Most people's living spaces are subject to the pressures of everyday life rather than a coherent design brief. Clutter and dust accrue, while fixtures and surfaces might be worn, outmoded or haphazardly repaired. In her first solo show with Standard (Oslo), Swedish artist Cecilia Jiménez Ojeda depicts the nooks and crannies of a family member's time-worn apartment. Simply titled 'Interiørdetaljer' (Interior Details), the exhibition includes seven hyperdetailed and naturalistic graphite-pencil drawings based on photographs, each smaller than an A4 sheet of paper. True to the show's title, the drawings are close-ups, leaving the overall layout and size of the apartment undisclosed. In Uten tittel (Rør) (Untitled [Pipe], all works 2024), two narrow pipes are held against the wall by a hefty bracket, an electrical wire curving up and around them.…

As I approach a pedestal, a mysterious voice says: 'You think you're so clever. I see you.' Atop the plinth is a wax cast of the artist Lynn Hershman Leeson's face, replete with a glass eye and synthetic hair. This whispering work, Paranoid (1968-2022), from the series 'Breathing Machines' (1965-2022) establishes the visitor as both astute observer and voyeur. Nearby, a corridor is lined with a number of black and white photo-collages of women's body parts combined with machines (from the series 'Phantom Limb', 1985—90); at the end, a doll sits in a vitrine, seemingly looking in my direction (CybeRoberta, 1996). Only upon nearing the doll do I realize it is actually surveilling me: her eyes have been replaced with cameras, the livestream footage from which plays on a tiny…

Andrea Fraser rearticulates a canonical art-historical moment with her new exhibition at Marian Goodman, Paris. 'Untitled (Video, Audio, Objects)' is the artist's first solo exhibition in France, and only her second commercial show since returning to the market-facing art world in 2023, following a near-ten-year hiatus. Tire presentation reflects Fraser's years of working in and critiquing museum contexts. In the main room, the exhibition begins with the video Untitled (2003); in the 'crypt' space below partially plays the audio from that video, Untitled (2003/4). The former is a 60-minute conceptual piece that examines the transactional aspects of artistic production. It features Fraser performing as 'the artist' and 'making love', as she terms it in the audio, with a man who has previously bought the video work. Here, he is referred…

WHEN I ARRIVED IN SANTO DOMINGO, the capital of the Dominican Republic, it was my first visit to the country, and only my second time on the island of Hispaniola. In 2021, I had travelled to neighbouring Haiti for my grandfather's funeral, just months before the assassination of former president Jovenel Moïsc. The streets were crowded with student demonstrations protesting policeviolence, political corruption, high petrol prices and gang violence, among other concerns. The vile stench of scorched rubber and trash left my stomach turning, as emblazoned barricades made of debris and tyres blocked roads and caused chaos. Three years later, my experience on the other side of the island couldn't have been more different, when I stepped off the plane at Las Americas International Airport and was ushered through security…

I FIRST VISITED Federal Correctional Institution McDowell, built on the former Indian Ridge mountain in West Virginia, in 2010, around the height of mountaintop removal coal mining, which destroyed more than 500 peaks across Appalachia. The road leading up to the prison had been cut through the former mountain, blasted away to expose millennia of rock strata. Mining had carved an isolated hole with high walls on all sides. ('The ideal geography for a correctional facility' is how the architect, AECOM, described the location.) What I was looking at was part of an insatiable cycle: one that started well before the extraction of coal and has continued through the extraction of labour and value in other ways, with no end in sight. In the Appalachian regions, where I am from,…

IN Trace the shadow between this world and the other (2024) -a two-channel video installation included in her recent exhibition, 'Gulf, at New York's Storefront for Art and Architecture - Irnani Jacqueline Brown overlays data on petrol infrastructure with an image of a 19th-century painting depicting a burial in a plantation grove. The competing aerial and frontal vantages compound and obscure the delivery of information. With a turn of orientation, Brown suggests another kind of knowledge embedded in histories of perspective. A vanishing point is also a point of convergence; perspective is a demonstration of relationship. 'Studying the Gulf's geomorphology through arcane geology white papers, cryptic core samples and cosmological theories of earth,' Brown explains in the exhibition literature, 'I have come to believe in a correlation between Chiexulub [an asteroid…

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A synthetic garden of soft sculptures, crafted from olive-coloured fabric, blooms in Margarita Cabrera's solo show 'Secuelas: cuerpo, tierra, y mar' (Repercussions: Body, Land and Water). Made to resemble indigenous cacti from the borderlands and arrayed in terracotta pots, works from her 'Space in Between' series (2010-ongoing) are constructed from secondhand uniforms formerly belonging to US border patrol agents. While buttons and logo patches remain fixed, fraying threads along the seams hang downward like vines. Since 2010, the El Paso-based textile artist, who emigrated from Mexico as a child, has hosted embroidery workshops with migrant communities, teaching Otomí sewing techniques. Produced in these workshops, knotworks of multicoloured pictograms and words cover Cabrera's sculptures, weaving transborder experiences into a rich tapestry of resilience. While earlier pieces from this celebrated series focused…

For 'Sueño de la Madrugada (A Midnight's Dream)', Firelei Báez's first UK solo exhibition, South London Gallery becomes a vibrant twilight zone. In the show's titular installation (all works 2024), vast swathes of fluttering ultramarine fabric cloak the walls and ceiling. Oval perforations in the cloth allow heavenly white light to shine through, dappling the floor below. Plants, including aralia, eucalyptus and thyme, adorn the lower reaches of the canopy, while the space is filled with a harmonic soundtrack of recordings the artist made in the Caribbean and nearby Peckham Rye. On parallel walls, two aluminium pieces - Numinous (the beautiful terror of eternity) and Joy out of fire (speaking to the space you fill and you keep) - flash with glittery acrylic protrusions of aquatic green and intergalactic purple.…

Interdisciplinary artist Haroon Mirza is known for making the invisible visible and the insensible sensible through collaborative installations that pair mesmerizing audiovisuals with minimalist aesthetics. 'Ceremonies and Rituals' at Tokyo's SCAI The Bathhouse focuses on an intriguing strain of Mirza's practice: the investigation of spirituality as a kind of frequency or current. The show comprises two parts. In the first space are six wall-mounted works in two sizes from the series 'Solar Cell Circuit Composition' (2019-ongoing). Arranged on plain grounds, solar cells in a deep metallic blue and shiny copper tape produce a clean geometric pattern that evokes the aesthetics of Islamic art. The smaller works from the sub-series 'Ogdoad Interstellar Magnet' (2024—ongoing) feature two squares made from copper tape that overlap to form an eight-pointed star: in a Muslim…

Focusing on her performances, installations and photographs from the 1970s to the present day, 'Begin Suddenly in Splendour, Rose English: Performance, Presence, Spectacle' is the British artist's first institutional solo exhibition in the German-speaking world. Positioning her queer-feminist work at the intersection of theatre, dance and vaudeville, it makes evident that English's artistic home has always been the stage, whether performing with large ensembles at London's Hackney Empire or in the north London squat where she once lived. Born 1950 in Hereford, English's early work was influenced by the equestrian culture she came across through her father, who was in the military, and her interactions with the British upper class. In the photograph Rose on Horseback with Tail (1974/2012), for instance, she wears nothing but a black belt to which…

'Kathrin Sonntag and Gabriele Münter: The Travelling Eye' presents two German artists, both born in Berlin, yet a century apart. While Sonntag is known primarily for her photography, Münter is widely recognized for her association with the German expressionist group Der Blaue Reiiter. Far more attention has been given to Münter's paintings, but it is her photographs that form the focus of this exhibition, curated by Sonntag alongside her own work. The show borrows its title from Sonntag's video The Travelling Eye (2024), based on photographs she took of Münter's snapshots through a magnifying glass. The projection highlights unexpected details in the artist's images, such as the clasped hands of a sitter or the way light falls on a scene. By pairing Münter's photographs with ones from her own archive,…