Table of contents for Issue 243 - May 2024 in Frieze

Eddie Chambers is the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professor in Art History at the University of Texas, USA. He is the editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to African Diaspora Art History. → One Take: Winner Takes It All, p.20 Franklin Melendez is a writer, independent curator and co-founder of the art advisory firm, DM Office. → Behind the Scenes: Animus, Anima, Animate, p. 29 Carlos Valladares is a writer and critic. His work has appeared in Gagosian Quarterly, the San Francisco Chronicle and n+1. He is currently working on his first screenplay and a dissertation on the French director Jacques Demy. → Behind the Scenes: Cool Connection, p. 27 Alastair Curtis is a playwright. He is the founder of The AIDS Plays Project, a campaign to revive the theatrical…

HOSTING PERFORMANCE in institutions, particularly those that have historically presented more traditional formats, is both tempting and tricky. Tempting in that, in an era propelled by visibility and all things social, performance offers a fully-fledged public programme: a moment for artists and audience alike to see and be seen, to socialize and be on the socials. Tricky in that, despite how well performance often presents on Instagram and TikTok, grand museal halls are just as frequently ill-equipped – acoustically, spatially – to host the performance, let alone care for the performers. To a large extent, performance artists require exposure to both disseminate their ideas and maintain their livelihoods. For those not bolstered by, say, a tenured teaching position or a robust, adjacent painting practice, their performances pay for their lives;…

As our common understanding of international borders fundamentally shifted following the COVID-19 pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine, I found myself becoming curious about previous instances of significant geopolitical realignment. I began by investigating the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union – which prompted American political theorist Francis Fukuyama to famously question, per the title of his 1989 essay, whether this might even signal ‘The End of History?’ But despite the popularity of this phrase, Fukuyama’s conclusion was ambiguous. As part of this research, I stumbled upon G. Thomas Burgess’s 2010 essay ‘Mao in Zanzibar: Nationalism, Discipline and the (De)Construction of Afro-Asian Solidarities’, which examined a deep yet idiosyncratic connection between postrevolutionary Zanzibar and the People’s Republic of China. As Burgess writes, China became ‘widely regarded as…

Austria Belgium Czech Republic Denmark Finland France Germany Italy Liechtenstein Malta Monaco Norway Portugal Spain Sweden Switzerland United Kingdom…

Taking its title from philosopher Édouard Glissant’s question, ‘What If Carthage Hadn’t Been Destroyed?’ – posed in his book of collected poems Le Sel Noir (The Black Salt, 1957) – Nidhal Chamekh’s latest exhibition, ‘Et si Carthage’, is inspired by the ancient city whose ruins are a ten-minute drive from Selma Feriani’s new gallery space in downtown Tunis. Once the centre of the mighty Carthaginian Empire, the city was burned to the ground by Roman troops in 146 BCE, thus signalling the end of the Punic Wars and the demise of Rome’s primary adversary. By speculating on what might have happened if Carthage hadn’t been razed, Glissant offers a thought experiment in which the Punic people acted as a counterpoint to an empire that would go on to form the…

To weave with paint is an odd idea, but Brandon Logan has found a way of doing it well. He begins each piece with a series of vertical strings, flooding them with acrylic paint in different patterns to fuse the strings together; rather than working on top of a canvas, Logan creates one as he goes. The 45 works on display in ‘Dog Rose’, the artist’s first solo exhibition at Ingleby Gallery, combine sculptural and painterly elements with breathtaking finesse. There’s a quiet beauty to works such as Gooseberry (2023), in which five bands of pale green paint are separated by areas of exposed string. Purple bleeds out from behind the green, encroaching upon the empty strings, but the painting is left with thin gaps where no paint has touched;…

There is no formula for beauty, no reliable unit of measure. But there are suggestions of some underlying logic in Graham Little’s Untitled (Sunflower Head) (2022), an austere vanitas of a decaying sunflower blossom, its seed-heavy face puckered and dry, stippled with greening rot. Beside it rests a rodent’s skull and the exposed circuitry of a spent machine, half-hidden under a clean white sheet. The image is lean as a riddle. Does it disclose some secret knowledge of the world’s inner workings, a reminder of the impossibly intricate systems that organize reality? Perhaps some rigid grammar – cold, immovable, elegant – lurks beneath the surface of things. Little’s virtuosic talents are on display across 18 works on paper at the FLAG Art Foundation, the London-based artist’s first institutional solo exhibition…

A good rule of thumb for any art magazine: never miss a chance to celebrate Joan Jonas. We’ve done so with this issue of frieze, in a feature interview between the artist and her long-time friend and colleague, Lynne Tillman. When Tillman asks Jonas whether she thinks of her major exhibition, now on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as a retrospective, the artist is adamantly opposed to the word: ‘I’d never do that. I’m calling it a survey because it’s not everything I’ve made.’ Much remains to be created and much – inevitably, perhaps, for an artist whose work partly depends on the ephemerality of performance and bodily movement – has been excluded. That which cannot be documented easily is one theme that runs through…

ON A STREET IN HARLEM, New York, in 1963, a Black child runs back and forth. We hear Dizzy Gillespie’s swift trumpet runs. We also hear teenager Duke Custis (Rony Clanton) singing the praises of owning a gun: ‘You get yourself a piece, everything opens up for you.’ He wants to get a gun to become the feared leader of the Royal Pythons gang. The child’s ball rolls down the street. Dizzy plays fast and faster. Duke picks up the ball. He tosses it back and the kid keeps running. Duke looks up at a street sign he has seen, sees and will always see: ‘West 120th Street’. It’s 1970. In a London flat full of artists, sitting between Jacques Rivette and Yoko Ono, American filmmaker Shirley Clarke is being…

WHEN I WAS STARTING OUT AS A CURATOR, I really wanted to be published. I dreamed of people being able to read something I’d written about an artist. And I don’t mean run out from the office printer at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where I had my first gig as an assistant curator. I’m talking about my words on the glossy pages of an exhibition catalogue. When Christine Kim and Thelma Golden invited me to write about Jina Valentine for the ‘Frequency’ catalogue in 2005 – the follow-up and second ‘F-show’ after the game-changing ‘Freestyle’ (2001) – I was so excited, and more than a little daunted. What I appreciated most about the commission was the first-hand insight I gained into the Studio Museum’s process, equally evident in all…

LYNNE TILLMAN Joan, you’ve just come from MoMA. What was it like installing this … are you calling it a retrospective? JOAN JONAS I’d never do that. I’m calling it a survey because it is not everything I’ve made, but it’s a lot. LT How do you figure out the best way to show all this very diverse work? JJ You have to make a model, so a model, actually two, were made: one is at my place and the other, which was the working model until very recently, is at MoMA. And then I worked also with the curator, Ana Janevski, who is very good. The MoMA team has been in my loft doing research and going through the archives for almost three years, so they knew the work…

With this year’s Whitney Biennial already having been dismissed by many critics (The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vulture) as riskless, I felt hard-pressed to agree. It’s an accusation that – for an exhibition which, historically, has been the target of tremendous rebuke and, in recent years, mired by unwelcome, and seemingly never-ending, controversy – feels somewhat pedantic, even tiresome. Yet, criticism with a capital ‘C’ appears to rear its ugly (albeit discerning) head with greater zeal at the Whitney Biennial – the longest-running show dedicated to art in the US – than at any other large-scale exhibition on the North American art calendar. While many may disagree with this observation, to me the scale and severity of the biennial’s media coverage feels disproportionate – especially when considering how…

A sense of the improvisatorial filters through the paintings and drawings in Curtis Talwst Santiago’s ‘A man not in the mood for Salsa’, the artist’s second solo show at Martina Simeti, Milan. In contrast to the painstakingly crafted miniature dioramas of his ‘Infinity Series’ (2012– ongoing) that were my first introduction to the artist’s practice, this show sees Santiago freely deploy a combination of oil pastel, spray paint and charcoal, as well as acrylic and watercolour on canvas. There is a lyricism to the artist’s freeform approach, a nod perhaps to his own past as a singer and musician in Canada and music’s continued presence within his art-making. This influence is made explicit in one of several small canvases, Afro-Sonic Mapping (2024), titled after a 2022 book by the artist…

Anna Barriball’s latest works are experiments in the hopeful yet impossible task of capturing time. In the artist’s exhibition at Frith Street Gallery, washes of colour – chartreuse, cyan and sage among them – flood her drawings of domestic spaces, seascapes and trees. Her works use a range of techniques involving graphite, wax and pastel dust to construct a layered, translucent effect. For Barriball, colour and mood foreground and partially obscure the facts of what she depicts. Simultaneously contained and transient, the artist’s work seeks to concretize memory in physical form. True-to-scale drawings of windows feature prominently throughout the exhibition. The largest of them, Studio window (blue fade) (2023–24), hangs at the exhibition entrance. This work, which depicts a series of intersecting grilles, offers 92 frames through which light could…

I NEVER CALLED MYSELF A PUPPETEER – I still don’t. When I started making this kind of work in the early 1980s, there were hardly any other contemporary artists working in American puppetry. It was entirely different in Europe, which has a longstanding tradition not only of extremely sophisticated and refined puppetry, featuring extensive physical training, but of funding artists. In America, on the other hand, we were isolated and did everything ourselves. It was all for the best, though, since I was always more interested in performance artists, especially the women, like Elizabeth LeCompte and Carolee Schneemann. Those were my peers and the people I was drawn to. There were also experimental companies like Mabou Mines working at the edges of theatre. They were interdisciplinary, into tech and making…

SOME OF THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS that I remember from my time working at the Studio Museum occurred behind closed doors. Several took place as part of the Studio Lab programme, which director and chief curator Thelma Golden conceived of as an opportunity to fund the unfundable. These included a song Lonnie Holley improvised when he visited Harlem from Atlanta, using materials he found on the street as a prompt for the 2014 exhibition I organized, ‘When the Stars Begin to Fall’. A description of a parkour course Steffani Jemison presented while on a location scout, during a trip from Houston, for one of her ‘Escaped Lunatic’ videos (2010– 11). And a summer 2011 exchange among Coco Fusco, Malik Gaines, Ralph Lemon, Tavia Nyong’o, Pope.L and Jenny Schlenzka about whether…

How to identify Ghislaine Leung amid the lunching crowd at a south London cafe? In this image-greedy world, Leung is that rare creature: a public figure of whose physical person no trace seems to exist online. Google suggested a scant handful of faces in response to the prompt: ‘Ghislaine Leung, portrait’. Among them, jarringly, was my own. It turned out to be the headshot from my article about Leung’s nomination for the 2023 Turner Prize. Still, I felt disconcertingly like I was on the receiving end of a conceptual prank. Leung makes art that explores, among related subjects, the labour conditions of making art. Often, this is through what she refers to as ‘scores’: written descriptions or instructions to be followed to physically realize the work. For ‘Holdings’, Leung’s spring…

Robert Frank at 100: in the last years of his life, it seemed a plausible enough prospect. So many great, mid-20th-century photographers appear to have been blessed with a more or less productive longevity, not quite explained by active lives spent hefting around camera equipment. For a long time, it was possible to be surprised that some legend of the medium was still going, perhaps still making work, or had died only recently, within what felt like the compass of the contemporary. Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Klein, Helen Levitt and Irving Penn all lived into their 90s, dying in a new century whose vantage made their best-known images seem like monuments we walk past every day. We might say the same about Frank, who died in 2019, aged 94, six decades…

In the southern Indian state of Karnataka, a sinuous new art centre rises out of the red earth. Founded by billionaire megacollector, patron and ART India founder, Sangita Jindal – with daughter Tarini Jindal Handa serving as creative director – Hampi Art Labs, according to its website, promises to ‘create cultural links across the Global South’. Built on the private land that houses JSW employees, the art centre, designed by Mumbai-based firm sP+a, takes inspiration from the magnificent bouldered landscape of the nearby Tungabhadra River. Its snaking, manicured roof has been dubbed ‘the Hampi High Line’, in reference to its New York counterpart. (A sculpture park is to follow.) Although located some 30 kilometres away, the centre takes its name from the nearby UNESCO site of Hampi, in the kind…

Published posthumously in Ego Psychology and Psychoses (1952), Jewish-Austrian psychologist Paul Federn’s collated writings on the ego expanded Sigmund Freud’s theory of how the self develops over time. Federn’s belief that the human personality consists of many ‘egostates’, rather than a single homogenous unit, is the inspiration for the aptly titled, two-person show ‘EGOSTATE’ at Leipzig’s G2 Kunsthalle. Curated by Leo Wedepohl, the exhibition brings together works by German artists Benjamin Houlihan and Vivian Greven – partners in life and, on occasion, art – featuring recognizable motifs that are split into multiple frames, folded and unfolded, or cut up and reshaped into eerie new forms, evoking a sense of uncanny disruption and repetition. The exhibition begins with a traditional love story that’s been broken up. DIA III (2024), Greven’s brightly…

stanley brouwn, who died in 2017, is among the past century’s most compelling and elusive artists. Despite being a relatively unfamiliar name among the wider public, he has been revered by fellow artists for his conceptual rigour, extreme methodology and playful, dematerialized gestures. He is nearly as known for what we don’t know about him as for what he left behind. He tightly controlled the conditions of his art’s reception, as well as information about his life and work. He objected to reproductions and interpretative texts: no exhibition catalogue, no press release, no images, no public talks. No capital letters in his name. Following the late artist’s wishes, the Hammer Museum refused me a checklist at his eponymous exhibition. Still, it is insufficient to say that brouwn’s work speaks for…