Table of contents for Issue 257 - March 2026 in Frieze

Ahaad Alamoudi is an artist. Her solo exhibition ‘Sunkissed’ is on view at Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE, until 3 May. Networks: On the Road, p. 19 Ruba Al-Sweel is an artist. Her work is on view at the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale until 2 May. Networks: Time to Reconnect, p. 23 Maru Pabón is a writer, translator and assistant professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University, Providence, US. She co-edited the volume Art and Politics Between the Arab World and Latin America (Brill, 2025). Profile: Alia Farid, p. 54 Mohammad Alfaraj is an artist, film director and writer. He was awarded Gold in the Emerging Artist category at the Art Basel Awards 2025. His work is on view at Taipei Biennial 2025, Taiwan, until March 29. Networks: Ancient Contemporaries,…

WHEN I CO-FOUNDED THE THIRD LINE in 2005, there were only really two other galleries of note in Dubai: Green Art Gallery, exhibiting only modern, mostly Arab, artists; and the Majlis Gallery, focusing on non-contemporary art. But soon, other galleries started opening, and in recent years many international ones have moved here too, for instance from Turkey and Spain. Now we have around 30 galleries, which is a lot for Dubai. I’m excited about a space called Bayt AlMamzar, located outside central Dubai – in fact, closer to Sharjah – in the childhood home of founders Gaith and Khalid Abdulla. Their grandmother used to live in the beautiful one-storey house, with its little garden, until she moved away, and then it was just empty. The brothers were interested in the…

FAISAL AL HASSAN To offer a foundation for our discussion, I’d like to start by asking each of you to reflect on the past 20 years from your own positionality and relationship to our shared landscapes. I’m interested in teasing out different perspectives on what has changed in our ecological systems, what has been lost or left behind in our anthropological networks and what new growth or beginnings you have witnessed. Maybe we can start with Sara. SARA AL OMRAN We’ve noticed that there’s been a huge focus on cities as the primary sites where futures are imagined: whether in terms of leisure, economic development or cultural identity. The phrase ‘Gulf Futurism’, for me, carries an association with the vision shaped by the GCC collective and other artists and movements…

FAWZ KABRA Your work often involves physical gestures, such as laying bricks or tearing and darning silk, which you’ve described as acts of mending and continuity – stitching ruptures, as it were. How do these embodied processes shape your understanding of repair, both artistically and ethically? DANA AWARTANI If we turn to some of my textile works that use darning as a craft form, such as the series ‘Come, let me heal your wounds. Let me mend your broken bones, as we stand here mourning’ [2019–ongoing] and the series ‘Let me mend your broken bones’ [2023–ongoing], they are all about repair, but also ancestry. Looking back, for example, at our grandparents’ generation: they used to repair their clothes. They wouldn’t throw a shawl away: they would mend it. Central to…

Nostalgia in the post-communist, Eastern European context is a complicated terrain. Its remnants aren’t confined to the past but remain woven into everyday life – its infrastructure, architecture and political rhetoric – while its material culture circulates as a commodity, from retro tourism to curated ‘ruin’ aesthetics. This marketable Ostalgie often flattens history into familiar visual codes. Yet, nostalgia’s affective pull can also serve as a tool for negotiating the ideological and economic ruptures of the post-1989 landscape. Within this shifting field, the image of the socialist female worker, poised behind the counter, can easily tip into a glossy, seductive, retro-nostalgic signifier, even though many of her conditions persist in today’s service economy. The artists in ‘Za Pultem’ (Behind the Counter), at Telegraph Gallery in Olomouc, examine this figure under…

At Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, Harold Offeh’s first institutional survey in the UK showcases over 20 years of the artist’s practice. Beginning in the 2000s and meandering playfully towards the present day, ‘Mmm Gotta Try a Little Harder, It Could Be Sweet’ centres on Offeh’s video and performance works but also includes audio and installations. The first thing we become aware of is Offeh’s voice, which pops and gurgles overhead in the entranceway. Mmm (2025), an audio track in which the artist vocalizes the show’s title (lifted from the Portishead song ‘It Could Be Sweet’, 1994), sets the tone for a display characterized by light-heartedness and pop culture references. Throughout, primary colours, soft edges and the imperative ‘PLAY’, printed on the walls and suspended above, guide the viewer in how to…

From the gliding perspective of a drone, we encounter the Copco Number 1 Dam on California’s Klamath River: a monumental feat of earthwork and environmental engineering. The hulking concrete mass holds back an entire lacustrine ecosystem on one side and oversees a mostly dry riverbed on the other. This infrastructure, along with its surrounding ecology, is the protagonist of Lucy Raven’s newest video installation, Murderers Bar (2025), a co-commission by the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Vega Foundation. The single-channel, 42-minute video is currently on view in an eponymous exhibition at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, where it is displayed on a concave screen and viewable from spare bleacher seating (as is characteristic of Raven’s installations). Aptly shot in portrait orientation, Murderers Bar narrates the moment at which…

The lives and work of so many of the artists featured in this issue -our first devoted entirely to the Gulf region – are defined by movement, whether across borders or between genres. ‘The Gulf ’s social, cultural and economic systems have always been shaped by movement,’ 421 director Faisal Al Hassan tells us in a long roundtable devoted to Gulf futurism and the numerous changes occurring in the region now. In our columns section, Saudi Arabia’s SINDBAD Collective reflect on how their nomadic exhibition practice has reached new communities in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain; Samir Bantal writes about renewed interest in the nomadic terrains of the countryside; and filmmaker Mohammad Alfaraj speaks to Róisín Tapponi about depicting flight and flux in a part of the world undergoing immense transformation…

Transfer, transfer some credit fromyour heart,so I can top up my feelings with it.The service, the service in the pulse ofmy veinshas been cut off, my love.Every time you reconnect,you bring the pulse of our bond backto life.— ‘Saleh Al-Roushan’,as sung by Mohammed Taherin Arab Idol, 2011 WE HAVE PHONES BECAUSE we have language, and we have language because we’ve been initiated into a symbolic order whose main drive is a quest to affirm our own aliveness. To connect. To communicate. To engage in utterances and affirmations that capture our reality and construct meaning. Long before AI companions, burner phones offered the anonymity and impermanence that comes from disentangling the body from erotic projections. These cheap, prepaid SIM cards – often bought without a long-term contract and housed in disused…

It would be easier if we were driving to her studio, Alia Farid admits to me, hands on the wheel of her white 70s Series Toyota Land Cruiser – if only there were a studio to drive to. We’re travelling along one of the longest marine bridges in the world as an oversized red sun dips behind the Kuwait City skyline. ‘It’s all the studio,’ she says with a half-smile. Farid wants to take me as close to the Iraqi border as possible. I won’t be able to cross into Basra and drive into Nasiriyah, the city in which she works with a cooperative of weavers to create tapestries portraying mosques from across the Caribbean and the menus of Arab restaurants in Puerto Rico, where I was born and raised…

In recent years, the art scene in the Gulf region has seen the arrival of a series of international art-world power players. Art Basel launched a fair in Qatar in February; Frieze will take over Abu Dhabi Art from November; and over the past two years, in quick succession, Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Bonhams have all announced initiatives in Riyadh. In terms of institutions, Abu Dhabi is now host to the Louvre and the Guggenheim, while AlUla’s Contemporary Art Museum has been developed in partnership with Paris’s Centre Pompidou. In turn, many of these organizations are being buttressed by Gulf money, with Saudi Arabia contributing EU€50 million to the current renovation of the Pompidou and Abu Dhabi acquiring a US$1 billion minority stake in Sotheby’s. Art infrastructure is scaling up, too:…

The 18th Rome Quadrennial, held at the city’s Palazzo Esposizioni, opens with sculptor Giulia Cenci’s secondary forest (2024), the show’s only stand-alone installation. Sparse, wiry branches bearing human and dog heads sprout from rusted earth, barely filling the alcove created by two white walls that don’t fully connect, affording a peek at the galleries beyond. This delicate introduction grew on me, though it marked a modest, somewhat tentative start to Italy’s pre-eminent survey of home-grown contemporary art, this year titled ‘Fantastica’. Launched in 1931 to espouse Italian fascist cultural supremacy and rebranded in 1948 to signal a regime change, the quadrennial carries a complicated legacy. This year, five curators frame Italian art of the 21st century through five thematic chapters, focused around artistic independence, collective autarky, image culture, the body…

Muddied paint, washes of splotched oil, mediums mixing or refusing to mix, yellowing varnish coagulating over a trapped fly and a loose hair on stretched linen. There is no coherent subject matter to be seen in Libasse Ka’s painting Untitled (all works 2025), yet it is undeniably rich in substance. Scratched lines like tally marks dig into the skin of the background, and small spherical shapes of colour are shaded to perfection. For his first institutional solo exhibition, ‘Notes on Shape Shifting’, the Senegalese-born, Brussels-based artist presents 19 oil paintings of varying dimensions, installed in a gallery space perforated by a glass atrium, at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle. His gestural strokes, heavy textures and all-over expressive intensity form the essence of each work. In the exhibition text, Ka’s methodology…

‘Deviant Ornaments’ at National Museum, Oslo, argues that expressions of same-sex desire can be found throughout the history of Islamic art – if only one knows where to look. A small but striking selection of sensuous, richly decorated artefacts demonstrate strands of desire encoded throughout centuries of courtly ritual and decor, while pieces by contemporary artists, working within a queer and Muslim context, offer a charged contrast between historical opacity and present-day transparency. A drawing with delicate, flowing linework, attributed to Muhammad Qasim and dated around 1650, depicts a Safavid prince holding court, surrounded by functionaries and musicians. The male attendants dotted throughout the scene are all young and beardless, a recognized trope holding erotic connotations in Persian poetry and painting. Other objects within the exhibition are less straightforward to…

New ages come with new images to gild them. Whether in protest or adulation, images that take information and power as their subject must also contend with other forces in play: an era’s universalist ‘truthiness’, which, when created by those in power, curdles into moralizing allegory; and the material conditions of the ‘now’, which anchor the work to its time. Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), with its cubist dismemberment, fit the ravages of the Spanish Civil War. Every era leaves a world that couldn’t have been made in another time. What remains are forms calibrated to its technologies and terrors, registering how ideology has travelled through it. What paintings, then, could stand as totems for the perversities of today: the way screens contort the body as we plummet down online rabbit…

‘FILM’, SAID THE ARTIST M.F. HUSAIN to The Sunday Indian in 2010, a year before he died, ‘is the most powerful medium to articulate your ideas with force. It has actors, dialogues, songs, music and yes, colours.’ Right on. And, in his 1980s photographs of Chennai, he proves this assertion. Film, in these photographs, spills into the street to comment on the daily life – the foot-ballet, biking and breathing – that gives weight to necessary fantasies: song, action, desire. Indian cinema hoarding - oversized, brightly coloured and hand-painted posters that advertise coming attractions – is a marvel of urban vernacular architecture and a critique of everyday life. Its beauty comes across in this Husain photograph, in which a billboard showcasing the Tamil film Guru (1980), starring Sridevi, grandly adorns…

WHAT IF THE REAL STORY of our century is unfolding not in cities, but outside them? For roughly a century, the modern city has monopolized ambition. Opportunity, creativity and progress were assumed to live in density, in the vertical accumulation of people and capital on flat land. The countryside, by contrast, was what you left behind. A staging ground for nostalgia or, worse, decline. ‘Countryside, The Future’, the OMA/AMO 2020–21 show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, operated through discrete ‘global zooms’ – case studies scattered across continents. ‘Countryside: A Place to Live, Not to Leave’, now installed in Doha at the Qatar Preparatory School and National Museum of Qatar, proposes otherwise. The exhibition advances a single geographic thesis: ‘the Arc’. The Arc describes a continuous band of predominantly…

I was born in Senegal. My father was a diplomat, but he quit when I was six months old and we moved back to Kuwait. There was a liberal, progressive atmosphere in 1960s and ’70s Kuwait, but everything shifted after the Iranian Revolution (1978-79). When my parents returned in 1983, they were still in that ’70s mindset. They were interested in communism and had even pursued their higher education in Moscow. After Russia, they moved to several African countries, so their mindset was very different from those of traditional families in Kuwait. Suddenly, they were transplanted into this conservative atmosphere, and they didn’t know what had happened. We were living in this strange liberal cocoon, inside a heavily religious, highly patriarchal society. My mother was a huge advocate for women’s…

If you’re a regular at the Blue Posts pub on Bennet Street, St James’s, you may have noticed a change across the road: the 18th-century sash windows of the handsome Georgian townhouse opposite, previously shuttered, have been restored and a new door installed. Modern Art has moved in. The inaugural exhibition, ‘Polygrapher’ by Joseph Yaeger, features ten new watercolour on gessoed linen paintings, accompanied by a meta-fictional text consisting solely of the answers the artist provided to a lie detector test. Standing before these paintings – inspecting the images, then the rough surfaces (with ‘studio debris’ listed as a material) and trying to decode the nonsensical titles – we are compelled to project our own stories onto them. You may feel that you recognize one of these faces, but Yaeger…

‘Contours of Zero: Emerging Korean Artists in New York’ arrives at a moment when the visibility of Korean contemporary art in the US is being renegotiated across cultural, political and economic fronts. Korean cultural presence abroad has expanded noticeably in recent years, yet emerging Korean artists remain unevenly visible in the US, often routed through the broad category of ‘K-culture’ rather than recognized within contemporary art histories. Space ZeroOne, a new gallery with an emphasis on Korean art, has mindfully entered the fray. At a time when cultural exchange carries added symbolic weight amid US–Korea tension and tightening visa policies, the institution’s invocation of ‘zero’ suggests an open beginning with generative potential. Of course, intentions alone cannot orient a new venue in a saturated field of emerging artist programming. The…

Intermittently defunct for the past 12 years, the Museum of Mexico City is now host to curator Francisco Berzunza’s exhibition ‘Broken Column’, featuring 62 international artists around the loose theme of rejection. Berzunza intentionally produced the exhibition without state funding, enabling him to include works critical of the Mexican government, such as its historic repression – or rejection – of Indigenous artists like Máximo Pacheco. An artist of Otomi heritage, Pacheco worked as a mural assistant to Diego Rivera for his monumental murals of the Mexican Revolution in the Ministry of Education (1922–28). Pacheco went on to paint several murals of his own in schools, but over the years they were destroyed during building demolitions. Some of the only remaining photographs of Pacheco’s murals are by Tina Modotti, on display…