Indice dei contenuti per Issue 255 - November/December 2025 in Frieze

Tash Aw is a novelist. The South (Fourth Estate, 2025), his latest novel, was longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. → Essay: Across the Causeway, p. 60 Paige K. Bradley is an artist, writer and editor. She is the author of Drive It All Over Me (S*I*G-Verlag, 2023). Her work is currently on view in the travelling survey exhibition ‘CUTE’ at Kunsthal Rotterdam, Netherlands. → One Take: After Coco, p. 20 Saidiya Hartman is a writer and academic. Minor Music, Hartman's first stage adaptation, was commissioned by Hartwig Art Foundation and premiered at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, Netherlands, in October. → Performance: Imagining the Otherwise, p. 27 Camille Bacon is a writer. She is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Jupiter magazine. → Profile: Tau Lewis, p. 90 Aria Dean is an artist,…

FOR BETTER OR WORSE, what may today be called ‘performance art’ spills beyond that category's remit into dance, theatre, opera, lectures, readings and even fashion shows – often emptying out the original term completely. And it is fleeing to more traditional institutions – like theatres and opera halls – which are perhaps better equipped than museums, galleries and project spaces to attend to its ever-expanding, ever more specific and technical requirements. Recent trends within performance art (even the term feels anachronistic) turn away from the purely conceptual, visual or gestural towards other, historically institutionalized performing arts, with inflated productions that obscure its explicit delineation from formal theatrical structures. Take, for example, artist and choreographer Alex Baczyński-Jenkins's Malign Junction (Goodbye, Berlin) (2025), developed for the atrium of Gropius Bau in Berlin…

As a child growing up in Malaysia, I didn't know anyone who didn't have family in Singapore. Distant aunts and cousins would visit us regularly. Some of them had only recently moved across the causeway in search of new jobs and had inevitably settled there. They'd bring gifts of beautifully packaged biscuits or electronics that we couldn't get at home. They'd also bring stories of their lives, which could be summed up simply as: everything is better over there. It's impossible not to be dazzled by Singapore – not just by the glassy skyscrapers arranged neatly around Marina Bay but by the statistics that measure the performance-obsessed island nation: the highest GDP per capita in the world when adjusted for purchasing power parity, a 98 percent literacy rate, the world's…

‘I fancy myself something of a magician,’ the artist Tau Lewis tells me over Zoom in late August. Her monumental soft sculptures – often figures or heads stitched together from found fabrics and other materials – do what magicians’ charms do best: turn the ordinary into the spectacular, tricking us into believing that something supernatural, even divine, is at work. Just as her sculptures embody this incantatory quality, so do her words. In an interview with her mentor, the fellow self-taught artist Lonnie Holley, printed in the catalogue for her solo exhibition ‘Spirit Level’ (2024–25) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, she describes the importance of music to her life: ‘I can't exist without it, I can't work without it, I can't dream without it, and so I wonder…

He-Man, Buzz-Off, Ratar-O, Christ: in his mixed-media painting Demon Chief (1988), the late British filmmaker and artist Derek Jarman places a model of the crucified Son of God alongside figurines from Masters of the Universe (1982–present) and ThunderCats (1985–89), coating them all in a patchy layer of black oil paint. Tarring Jesus and the demons with the same brush, Jarman appears to muddy distinctions between the two – suggesting both are worthy of equal disrespect. The effect, however, is neither particularly furious nor shocking. Traces of their cartoon silliness remain, and the silhouetted figurines – with their rippling biceps and calabash thighs – do not quite suit a dark night of the soul. Rather than a flashy protest piece, Jarman's monochrome altarpiece is capacious, letting his terrors and fantasies lie…

‘The Invisible Hand’ is a precisely composed exhibition at Gianni Manhattan, staged as part of Vienna's Curated By festival – now in its 16th year and a fixture of the city's art calendar. In the exhibition text, the show's curator, Bianca Stoppani, draws attention to the notion of corpsing: the moment an actor breaks character on stage and starts laughing, embodying role and self at once. This recalls Sigmund Freud's essay ‘Humour’ (1927), where laughter is described as a mature defence mechanism: a collapse between superego and ego that allows the subject to relieve suffering while producing critical distance. Within the exhibition, this corpsing between system and subject functions as a glitch in capitalist visual technologies, interrupting the supposed neutrality of representation. The show opens with Morag Keil's video Passive…

At frieze, we often like to close our year by taking stock of the moment and looking ahead – twin poles for this issue, our last of 2025. Ahead of New York's Performa Biennial, our columns section looks closely at some of the artists revolutionizing contemporary performance. Aria Dean writes about building characters for her new play; Jeanette Bisschops looks at how the algorithm is shaping in-person performance; philosopher Saidiya Hartman describes the possibilities that unfold from endings; Miriam Stoney reflects on performance art's return to the theatre; and assistant editor Cassie Packard profiles our cover artist, Ayoung Kim, whose visionary practice constructs a multiverse of astonishing worlds. In our features section, the theme of performance continues with a profile of Tau Lewis, whose Performa commission revisits ancient Sumerian poetry.…

‘MINOR MUSIC at the End of the World’ is a performance in three movements, made in collaboration with actor André Holland, performer Okwui Okpokwasili, and artists Arthur Jafa, Precious Okoyomon and Cameron Rowland. It takes its inspiration from two of my essays, ‘The End of White Supremacy: An American Romance’ [2020] and ‘Litany for Grieving Sisters’ [2022]. I don't think I would ever have come to the idea of it being a performance if not for invitations from others. The first came from the 92nd Street Y's Unterberg Poetry Center, to have André read ‘The End of White Supremacy’. Hearing him read was an entirely different experience than reading my words on the page. It no longer felt as if they were solely mine. They became something else. After seeing…

It feels clichéd to say that inside a group show about dogs, there are two wolves – but this seems to be the case with ‘Pedigree’, a group show curated by the London-based OHSH Projects. Half of the show comprises art that feels feral and untamed: formally jagged, rough-edged. The other half, however, is smooth, safe, domesticated. It's this movement from the wild to the tamed that the show is concerned with, using it to explore humans’ canine companions and what they reveal about the people who have made them this way. In the oil painting Gone to the Dogs (2024) by Kit Reynolds, one of two works in the show that explore dog racing, a greyhound barrels down a racetrack as a man watches closely from behind the barrier.…

The City Palace in Jaipur exudes a certain stillness that permeates its courtyards and ornate facades. As you enter its first courtyard, Mubarak Mahal, the distant coos of peacocks and soft wingbeats of pigeons fill the air. Just beyond, ivory-white columns make way for the Jaipur Centre for Art, which opened within the palace complex in autumn 2024. Here, the exhibition ‘Non-Residency’, curated by Los Angeles-based gallerist Rajiv Menon, comes into focus. There's a curious friction between the 18th-century architecture and its contents: work by 15 contemporary artists of the South Asian diaspora, many of whom were raised in the Americas, where they have negotiated fragmented ancestral histories. At its core, ‘Non-Residency’ feels grounding. While the works are, in a sense, ‘returning’ to India, they resist simple nostalgia – transporting…

From the link between the word ‘avant-garde’ and French military reconnaissance troops to the maturation of the medium of photography on US Civil War (1861–65) battlefields, the historical connections between warfare and art-making are legion. Across her four-decade practice, Zoe Leonard has tended to focus on violences that take place far away from the front line, often zeroing in on artefacts and the implications of their display and decay. Yet in her latest solo exhibition, simply titled ‘Display’, Leonard puts a wartime technology front and centre: the suit of armour. Leonard's show is austere – if not bleak, then bare in a way that forces viewers to attend to the artist's subtler formal choices, which are numerous. The exhibition consists only of a handful of gelatin silver prints – six…

AN OPAQUE, lacquered case of sensuously curving angles which, when unclasped, reveals a compact quadrant of dazzling eyeshadows and highlighter – the lightest swipe of a fingertip can illuminate your look. Or: a small yet cumbersomely shaped black box with anywhere between one and four compressed mounds of variously coloured powders – you can rub them on your face. Two ways to say the same thing. I'm writing about the design of a Chanel compact. I'm writing about a Sylvie Fleury painting. To write about one is to write about the other. This is not about blurring boundaries, it's about Fleury's capricious, conceptual game of value: each is a gateway drug that deposits you as if through a trapdoor into industrially scaled desire, and it doesn't matter which you got…

FRIDAY NIGHT in East Williamsburg. Young people line up on the pavement, waiting to get into Pageant. The crowd is not just young, it's very young, with wardrobes ranging from medieval frocks to Y2K jeans. Once inside, they line up along the walls or squat down on the wooden floor. Pageant, a scrappy new space on the top floor of an inconspicuous building, has no lobby, no curtains to draw, no fancy lighting grid. The stage is often nothing more than a patch of floor, the performers closely surrounded by an audience consisting of their friends, colleagues and the performance-curious. Founded by Sharleen Chidiac, Lili Dekker, Jade Manns, Owen Prum and Alexa West in 2022, in the wake of the COVID-19 lockdowns, Pageant was conceived as a much-needed community and…

NATALIE DIAZ I first knew you as a writer, when you were doing the MFA programme in creative non-fiction at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe [IAIA]. I thought we could begin there and talk about education: what it means to you to have these different experiences of learning, both from elders and family – intergenerational knowledge – and through Native and Western institutions. How has that shaped some of the ways you move in the world as an artist, as well as a Native artist? ROSE B. SIMPSON It's fascinating, because my mom, who is also an artist, chose to raise me and my brother in the Santa Clara Pueblo [in New Mexico], and she wanted to return to ancestral ways of learning and being in…

One summer in the prelapsarian 1960s, I forsook the isles of Greece in favour of Ibiza, which I expected to be as unspoilt and austerely delightful as my beloved Mykonos. The first thing that met my eye, however, when I got off the bus in the resort town of San Antonio, was a sign over a cafe offering me ‘Tea Like Mum Makes It’. Oh, dear, I thought. The island was a tourist trap but also a haven for international idlers, crooks and conmen; by the time I learnt that, I was long gone. I fled by ferry to Barcelona and travelled onwards by rail, on the Talgo – which still runs, though at a faster pace these days. Through the afternoon we chugged up the long incline to the…

If history offers any consolation, it's that one day, someone else might live off the spoils of a previous generation's sacrifices and achievements. That it might become possible to take for granted the opportunities afforded to you as a Black woman; for the relative ease with which you move through the world to become so habitual, so routine, that its absence cannot be admitted to thought. Take the art world. Since 2020, it has been widely acknowledged that global Black art is on the rise. Journalists and collectors flock to art fairs across the African continent: 1-54 in Marrakech, Art X in Lagos, the Investec Cape Town Art Fair. Black figurative art, in particular, has been steadily collected and exhibited. Artists such as Kerry James Marshall, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Amoako…

Suzanne Song is a painter whose work simultaneously cites, scrutinizes and preserves the history of op art – one of the most distinctive styles to have emerged in Western painting during the 1960s. Short for ‘optical art’, the term was coined in a 1964 Time magazine article, which defined the approach as ‘playing on the fallibility in vision’ through the use of illusionistic patterns and designs. The pioneers of the form forsook the frenzied brushstrokes of abstract expressionism – the dominant movement of the time – and substituted them with sharp, geometric lines used for their graphic and perspectival effects. Currently on view at White Cube Mason's Yard in London, Song's exhibition ‘Interfold’ reaches for the full hypnotic potential of this type of painting. However, in contrast to her predecessors,…

Gallery Hyundai's main building, established in 1970 as Hyundai Hwarang, traditionally houses exhibitions of Korea's ‘national painters’ – 20th-century masters such as Park Soo-keun, Lee Jungseob and Chun Kyung-ja – while the newer annex, built in 1995, focuses on more contemporary and international programming. Logic suggested I'd find Candice Lin and Kang Seung Lee's ‘Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me’, a show highlighting two Los Angeles-based artists working across unexpected material registers, in this latter space. Instead, the show of new and recent work overtakes rooms conventionally reserved for canonical figures. The spatial inversion signals more than curatorial mischief. Upon entering the narrow vestibule, one encounters Lin's five polyglot drawings from 2025, titled ‘eat me’ in Spanish, Mandarin, Korean, English and Danish (Cómeme, 吃我 (Chī…