Table of contents for Issue 240 - January/February 2024 in Frieze

MY FIRST MISTAKE is wearing a suit. On the occasion of my inaugural visit to the Magic Castle, I have paired a vintage navy-blue pinstripe Yves Saint Laurent with a black latex leotard from Lady Love a risquá dancewear emporium in Hollywood where I get most of my performance clothes. The owner, Avi, designs every spangly sparkly rubbery slip of fabric in the store with pride, and has a detached-but-concerned approach to the female form: a gynaecologist of glam. When I come out of the dressing room in the bodysuit, he puts his hand on his chin. ‘Very nice,’ he says, then gestures to the black wires of fluff sticking out the sides of the gusset. ‘Now you just shave here and shave here, and you are good.’ I remind…

WHEN HE BEGAN MAKING WORK in the 1980s, Xiyadie was both artist and audience. A still-closeted gay man, he would glue sheets of rice paper together in stolen moments at the home he shared with his wife and children. Then, in a form of automatic drawing, he would glide scissor blades through the thin surface, excavating intricate scenes of homoerotic coupling, building the foundations for his private dream of a flourishing queer future. In Gate (1992), crescent cut-outs denote the nipples, navels and smiles of lovers in the act of fellating. The artist's blade disambiguates the limbs of one figure and the head of another, and carves the indented pattern of a slightly ajar door behind them. This dimension is ruled by a different spatial logic: in papercut, it's the…

Over the last ten years, artist Marianne Keating has investigated colonial histories linking Ireland and Jamaica, particularly narratives of Irish migration to the Caribbean island around the Great Famine of 1845-52. An Ciúinas/ The Silence (2023), her new work on the subject, is presented as a three-screen, 57-minute film installation. Drawing heavily on state and broadcast media archives, Keating's film deftly combines found footage, news interviews and extracts from government documents with her own films oflandscapes and the occasional new interview. But with at least eight separate sections, Keating has perhaps attempted to integrate too much material. The artist's story’ begins with the an Gorta Mór evictions of around 1847. Black and white photographs of ruined homes segue into Victorian illustrations depicting mass emigration of the evicted rural poor travelling…

Often seen as interlopers to white, middle-class order, immigrant, queer and artist communities commonly overlap in neighbourhoods where rents are affordable. There, negotiated space tends to settle into a precarious but pluralistic visual language: schmaltz meets camp. In ‘Eviction Notice’, their first major exhibition in Canada, Elif Saydam articulates this aesthetic to a tee: a cartoonish vortex of hearts, apples, dollar signs and dark plums swallows the familiar signage of a late-night shop in Berlin (Losing my License, 2023). Bows and garlands adorn the black and white image of a local convenience store in Oakville, an ‘open’ sign glowing red in its window (Bong's Variety, Oakville, Canada, 2023). Altogether, these kitschy, overly decorated images gesture towards an excess of labour, time and effort, but also towards affection, authenticity and radical…

Center for Art, Research and Alliances, New York, USA Ligia Lewis, Mame Diarra Speis, Miguel Angel Guzmán and Corey Scott-Gilbert are frozen in angular positions on the ground. As I walk in, they are breaking out of their paralysis in slow, jerky movements that variously evoke shock, exhaustion and resurrection. study now steady (2023) - the eponymous ‘rehearsal made durational’, as the press release defines it, of Lewis's exhibition at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) - is thick with the pauses, slips and dizzy landings that populate the artist's earlier performances for stage and camera. There is the leg-slapping, foot-stomping, stepping and wobbly piling-together of minor matter (2016) that insists on urgent collectivity. There is the clamour of‘falling flesh’ - a term Lewis used recently in conversation…

‘What does the baby see when he or she looks at the mother's face?’ asked British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott in his influential paper ‘Mirror-role of Mother and Family in Child Development’ (1967). ‘Ordinarily,’ he went on to explain, ‘what the baby sees is himself or herself.’ Known as mirroring, this trust-building process positions us, from our earliest experiences, as relational beings. Maria Hassabi's ‘I'll Be Your Mirror’ her first solo show in Asia - features two new commissions that probe the mirror as a formal and psychological device, Drawing from the vocabularies of art and theatre, the works are what the artist refers to, in the exhibition literature, as ‘live installations': two slow, solo dances, which share a soundtrack, performed throughout the show's six-week run. White Out (all works 2023)…

Four larger-than-life figures greet viewers as they enter Green Art Gallery, Dubai. Created by Lebohang Kganye, these floating patchwork portraits - Nomasonto Mthembu, Maria Magadeni Mkhalipi, Job Mkhalipi and Gladys (all 2022) - draw from the Johannesburgbased artist's family albums. Stitching together chunks of black, white and grey cloth that recall old photographs, Kganye re-creates images of her relatives on gauzy layers of organza and calico. In direct opposition to apartheid's obscuring narratives, which eliminated the identities and cultural heritage of Black South Africans, the scale of the works reinforces the importance of family archives in preserving these memories for future generations. ‘Memory Is the Seamstress’ engages with themes of displacement and loss under enduring structures of violence through photographic archives translated onto fabric. The exhibition derives its title from…

JULIANA HALPERT It's been three years since your most recent solo exhibition in Los Angeles, ‘Without a body, without Bill’ at Hannah Hoffman Gallery. I'm curious whether your practice has changed since then and, if so, howyou situate within it the new body of work you'll be showing at the gallery’ early this year? KATE MOSHER HALL The upcoming show feels like a homecoming. ‘Without a body, without Bill’ debuted right after a major pandemic lockdown; I think 15 people came to the socially distanced opening. So, I haven't had a ‘normal’ show or opening with the gallery yet, and having this opportunity in my hometown, no less - prompted me to think about how my work has evolved over the last few years. ‘Without a body without Bill’ was…

In his UK solo debut, Benoît Pieron invites visitors to take shelter underneath a low, tent-like ceiling of patched-together hospital sheets. Dotting the gallery floor are egg-shaped emergency response lights, which the artist has programmed to spin rhythmically, choreographing faint discordant shadows against their surroundings. The overall impact of the installation measured, repetitive - is calming until you notice the sheets are streaked with what appears to be blood, and possibly other fluids, betraying the histories of ill or decaying bodies in other times and other places. The lights emit a high-pitched drone that quivers between silence and screaming; their waring, shaded in chromatic pastels, is hypervisible, ensuring we tread cautiously.The more time we spend inside the installation, the more its seeming tranquillity is replaced by a sense of unease;…

The tactility of Sheila Hicks's textile works from delicate, wall-mounted weavings to squishy, room-filling installations provides a neat counterpoint to the crispness of Alison Jacques's new space. The main ground-floor gallery allows plenty of room for visitors to encounter works that traverse multiple scales and materials. The selection, which ranges from 2009 to 2023, showcases the artist's technical innovation and glorious way with colour. For example, stretching nearly five metres along one wall, Talking Sticks (2021-23) consists of dozens of bamboo batons wound with multicoloured lengths of linen, cotton, silk and nylon. In contrast, older works on a more intimate scale, such as Fimbria (2018), incorporate surprising materials including slate, feathers and razor clam shells. Complex entanglements of elements draw you in: Mirage in the Oasis (2023), for instance, is…

A profusion of leafy matter spills out across the surface of Njideka Akunyili Crosby's Dwellers: Native One (2019), drawing the eye into an ambiguous somewhere patterned by pointed leaves, nimble branches and a screen wall evoking an urban home. Underneath - or amidst - it all float the faces of three women, whose steady gazes pierce through the lush veil that simultaneously protects and reveals them. The faint presence of these figures within the plants is eerie, almost phantasmic: it is as if we're encountering ghosts, as if a distant time dwells within this painting. Tree green pervades ‘Coming Back to See Through, Again’, Crosby's first solo exhibition at David Zwirner New York. The depicted plants - a new theme in the artist's oeuvre - are culled from her extensive…

Tetsuya Ishida was only 31 when he was struck and killed by a train in 2005. His youth, and in fact his entire artistic career, spanned Japan's lost decade of the 1990s, defined by the sararīman, or salarymen, trapped in offices, and the hikikomori, or shut-ins, who avoided the white-collar slog by barricading themselves in their parents’ homes. Ishida was inspired by the left-wing painter Ben Shahn and other social realists to face his generation's angst head on. The subject of an astonishing exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, New York, curated by Cecilia Alemani, his early paintings depict strange officescapes, Japanese working conditions laid out in dreamy tableaux that give shape to some latent social anxiety. A salaryman is delivered in a cardboard box while children watch his assembly (Recalled, 1998).…

In front of the Hammer Museum's gift shop, a colourful mound of ceramic hands and accompanying textiles awaits encounter. A sign nearby invites viewers to touch the sculpture, explaining that ‘each hand is made by a person with a history of migration’ and suggesting they should be handled ‘with care’. Shepherded by the collective Art Made Between Opposite Sides, Con nuestras manos construímos deidades / With our Hands We Build Deities (2023) tells the personal narratives of asylum seekers and refugees in Tijuana, San Diego and Los Angeles. Such a sensory and tender interaction is just one of many awaiting visitors to this year's ‘Made in L.A’ biennial. Titled ‘Acts of Living’, the sixth iteration prompts the city into a conversation with itself. After conducting more than 200 studio visits,…

In 1751, during the late Joseon dynasty, the artist Jeong Seon broke with the tradition of idealized, imagined landscapes in Korean ink painting by faithfully depicting the mist rising after rainfall at Mount Inwang (Inwang Jesaekdo). Nearly three centuries later, Suki Seokyeong Kang is presenting her own interpretation of the same subject at Leeum Museum of Art, where Jeong's painting is now housed. Comprising a series of curved reliefs that resemble mountain ridges, from which delicately hang metal chains and threads, Mountain (2020-ongoing) - installed in the museum's white-walled lobby - introduces visitors to a practice that transcends individual works to create an immersive viewing experience. While Kang majored in Korean painting, her interests are interdisciplinary, ranging from music and dance to architecture. Her series ‘Jeong’ (2014-ongoing), for instance, draws…

The conceptual superstructure of‘Humans and Demons’ - this year's edition of the annual festival steirischer herbst - loomed large even before the exhibition opened, with artistic director Ekaterina Degot detailing a focus on ‘moral grey zones’ The festival's accompanying text, meanwhile, sketched a premise of resignation in the face of‘our unravelling, ominous world’, citing the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the global experience of COVID-19, before culminating in the hypothesis that ‘survival might be impossible without entering a grey zone where the most violent and demonic qualities of humanity come to the fore'. Inspired by works of literature that explore the thin line between ‘the weak and the wicked’ - to quote Primo Levi in Jacques Prosser's Night of the Girondists (1992) - each of the four exhibition venues was…

Entering Neo Matloga's latest show, ‘Figures’, I find myself encircled, inescapably witnessed, by eight charcoal and ink portraits. Laying across the canvas in tense repose, these sombre sitters exude a sense of nervous intimacy through their deep expressions, dart-like eyes and close-cropped framing. Matloga's new works are a departure from his typical convivial scenes of collective Black joy, such as Khemistr (Chemist, 2022), in which cut up figures eat, laugh and embrace. The large canvases in the current show cover the walls of a single room at Stevenson. Matloga has loosely rendered each figure with smudges and streaks of black charcoal and ink, creating a context for collaged additions, such as an arm in Paulina (all works 2023) or a leopard-print skirt in Betuele. In some instances, such as Rosa,…

FOR MILLENNIA, people have gazed at the stars to conjure myths that make sense of the world around them - evidenced in objects that span from the Nebra sky disc (c.1800-1600 BCE) to modern-day astrological charts. Celestial bodies, constellations and zodiac signs feature prominently in the work of American artist Betye Saar, whose iconic box assemblages, such as Black Girl's Window (1969) and The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972), have come to define her practice within the canon of US West Coast assemblage and Black feminist art. It is lesser-known that, from the late 1970s, Saar expanded these intimately scaled artworks into what art historian Lowery Stokes Sims called ‘walk-in boxes': immersive, room-size installations that combine found objects with natural materials and works on paper. Through ritual acts, Saar assembles…

MAGIC has always been at the core of Hayao Miyazaki's cinematic project. It is the defining philosophical thrust that lends depth and poignancy to the Japanese filmmaker's output, especially in the highly idiosyncratic cosmologies of his undisputed masterpieces. The ‘magic’ of movement is also what formally links the artistry of animation to the larger history of cinema, particularly its nascent roots amidst the flickerings of carnival phantasmagoria. Lately, the craft of traditional animation has grappled with its own obsolescence, as the laborious process of hand-drawn cells has been largely replaced by more financially efficient digital alternatives. This could be why magic is usually rooted in loss in the Miyazaki-verse - the classic hydraulics of Sigmund Freud's ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917) enacted through an extravagant visual mise-en-scène. And so it is…

The mood at Stephen Friedman Gallery's new location on Cork Street is one of celebration. Walking along the pavement from Burlington Gardens, the first thing I see is a masked figure tottering on wooden stilts, torso twisted towards the window, head tossed back, arms in the air. I notice a curly tail and hooved feet, wtiich, like the rest of the body, have been painted in a Dutch wax batik pattern - the vibrant fabric that has become Yinka Shonibare's trademark. I tear myself away and pass through the entrance, suddenly feeling that I'm late to the party. And what a party! That figure - Hybrid Sculpture (Faun on Stilts) (all works 2023) - is one of a dozen new works by the Brilish-Nigerian artist, who has been with the…

The high-ceilinged, light-filled loft space of Canal Projects in Chinatown appears to have been taken over by an external operation. An elevated structure stands in the centre, its lower level curtained off with large drawings. It is surrounded by six large workstations that fuse industrial design with elements from traditional medicine: talismanic ink drawings, tinctures attached to tubing, ceramic computers, a clock, machinery, scattered pens and stray post-it notes. In Candice Lin's site-specific ‘Lithium Sex Demons in the Factory’, we piece together the story of an unnamed demon, awaking post-transformation, through crisply fluid animations playing on tablets, audio and printed segments pasted behind workstations. Exemplified by characters such as Malay penanggal and Buddhist hungry ghosts, demonic return in Asian folklore is often determined by a lack of fulfilment in human…

I was shocked to learn that Damián Ortega's exhibition ‘Pico y Elote’ (Corn and Industry), at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Monterrey (MARCO), is not only the artist's first career survey in his Mexican homeland, but in all Latin America. Perhaps even more surprising is that, rather than being held at a major institution in Mexico City, the retrospective is taking place in the relatively obscure northern city of Monterrey, in Ricardo Legorreta's remarkable, cavernous museum - resplendent with flourishes of colour, geometric shapes and water fountains. My astonishment at the exhibition's locale was also due to the notable clash between the leftist politics of Ortega - whose practice is widely known for mining and critiquing capitalist modes of production and the labour conditions of post-industrial Mexico - and…

One of my most treasured teenage memories is the nightly ritual my sister and I shared. I would lie in the bath, with Marina sitting next to me on a stool, talking of friendship, art, love and loss. These were distilled moments of sisterhood, bound by intimacy and endless curiosity. Such inquisitive symbiosis also shapes the exhibition ‘Back Stages’, which uncovers the stories of little-known Romanian artist Irèreano Codrèano and her sister Lizica, a dancer. They lived between Bucharest and Paris during the early 20th century, where Irène worked as an assistant to Constantin Brâncuși and Antoine Bourdelle. The show opens with a copy of her bronze sculpture Veșnicie (Eternity, 1937), which depicts the artist and her sister rising back-to-back from shallow water, bodies and hair entangled. Here, however, the…

Care and confrontation collide in the works of Ima-Abasi Okon. For her institutional debut in Germany, at Kunstverein in Hamburg, the London and Amsterdam-based artist considers the building's former purpose as the city's market hall - a place for the exchange of goods and ideas - to make visible the power play present within the German legal system. Her proposition is two-fold: an exhibition on the ground floor, ‘S,t.a.n.d.a.rd. P.r.a.c.t.i.c.e.’, explores the licence agreements of photographic reproductions, while another exhibition on the first floor, ‘Avg Pace …',features a new commission that looks at the (often arbitrary) ways in which legal authorization is granted or denied. Central to ‘S.t.a.n.d.a.r.d. P.r.a.c.t.i.c.e.’, made in collaboration with curator Taylor Le Melle, is the newest iteration of Okon's series ‘Mahalia’ (2014-ongoing). In four, mahogany-coloured OSB…

‘The stage as a home, and the home as a stage,’ was the motto by which the late Swedish artist and textile designer Moki Cherry lived. A creator of art and artistic communities, Cherry produced a celebratory and colourful oeuvre that is impressive in its interdisciplinary range and quietly radical in its commitment to a feminist reimagining of family life and artmaking. Now, more than a decade after her death, Cherry is the subject of the Moderna Museet retrospective ‘A Journey Eternal’, which begins with her close collaboration with her husband, legendary American jazz musician Don Cherry, and briefly touches on the work she created later in life as an artist in her own right. The exhibition opens with a black and white film of Don playing music for their…