Table of contents for Issue 256 - January/February 2026 in Frieze

The great achievement of the new right has not been its rhetoric of fear but its audacity to hijack the utopian imagination, once tied to the pursuit of alternative ways of living together and a potential emancipation from capitalist structures. Privatized space tourism turns the dream of a new world into a luxury escape route: as billionaires destroy the planet, they design the means to flee it, modelling collective desire without ethics. In this context, ‘Sex in Space’, curated by Bernardo José de Souza at Isla Flotante in Buenos Aires, arrives as a sly provocation. The question embedded in its title is not logistical (‘How do you do it in zero gravity?’) but ideological: can intimacy survive the gravitational pull of capital's cosmic fantasies? De Souza, Brazilian-born and Spain-based, assembles…

‘The boy quietly lifted the purple eyelids,’ reads a quotation by the 20th-century Austrian poet Georg Trakl, included in the accompanying text for Victor Man's exhibition at David Zwirner, London, ‘the silver forehead sighing in the night wind.’ This palette – nocturnal, expressionistic – chimes with that of Man's paintings, where figures often have a green cast, appearing by turns luminous and nauseous, as if captured beneath a sick moon. In one striking canvas, Maternity with Legend (2024), an infant swaddled in white seems to rest on the lap of a woman in a bright orange blouse. The child has closed its eyes. Is it sleeping? Or is it, as the grey-green pallor of its skin suggests, dead? The woman too has otherworldly -underworldly – skin. Her eyes are open…

‘It Takes a Village’, the title of the Guest Programme at this year's EVA International, is derived from the common proverb ‘It takes a village to raise a child’. If the labour of formative and meaningful child-rearing is best shared, the title seems to suggest, it follows that the organization and presentation of dozens of products of human creativity must also be approached communally. The 41st edition of Ireland's national biennial takes place in the city of Limerick, where the festival was conceived and has existed for its 48-year history. This year, a guiding collaborative spirit animates the curatorial vision of Eszter Szakács, guest programme curator; Iarlaith Ní Fheorais and Roy Claire Potter, selectors of the Platform Commissions; and the EVA team. Ana Bravo-Pérez's multi-part installation, If we remain silent…

The impulse of restraint and precision is well known in modernist architecture, echoed in interior design and reconsidered in Lauryn Youden's solo exhibition ‘I wanna hold the hand inside you’ at CIRCUIT Centre d'art contemporain, Lausanne. By reframing Eileen Gray's biography and iconic furniture designs through the prism of queer sentimentality, erotic ethics and disability discourse, Youden renegotiates objects and desire. What results is a commentary on control: the need for it, as well as its ultimate impossibility. In previous installations, Youden has suspended and recontextualized modernist furniture to reflect on the contemporary concerns of economic, institutional and bodily precarity in a postmodern society. However, in Lausanne, where Gray is her subject, the artist's approach turns tender. Across six works, her signature additions like a locket or a rape whistle…

‘What about me bugs you?’ asks Lutz Bacher in Do You Love Me? (1994), her 12-hour epic of interviews with friends, family, fellow artists and arts professionals. The question unsettles her interlocutors, who face the camera while Bacher remains off-screen, alternately laughing with and wheedling them for answers. Their mental arithmetic is plain: how serious is the question? Can it be answered? Should it? Their pauses guide the work – indeed, pausing predicates Bacher's art. Tellingly, the film – arguably the most biographical in the artist's oeuvre – does not appear in the galleries of ‘Burning the Days’, her first posthumous museum retrospective, nimbly curated by Solveig Øvstebø, Dirk Snauwaert and Helena Kritis. Instead, the curators of the show -which opened at the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, and will travel…

While being part of the body, the skin in Lukas Luzius Leichtle's oil paintings functions as something separate: no longer a comforting enclosure but a distancing surface. In his solo exhibition ‘Eindringling’ (Intruder) at the CCA Berlin, the body becomes an estranged counterpart, prompting us to question whether we ever fully understand our own corporeality or whether we are, in some ways, always an intruder within it. On entry, I first encounter Father's Sleeping Shirt (all works 2025): a powderpink T-shirt that appears to float inside out, perhaps caught in the act of being removed. The delicate composition and handling of oil on linen fuses fabric and flesh: creases become wrinkles and folds gather like skin, exposing the protection we seek in textiles and the indistinct threshold between interior and…

The 18th Istanbul Biennial opened with all the clarity and melodic precision of a well-tuned instrument. Yet, its run-up was an opaque morass of internal politicking, protests and a year-long delay before finally settling on Christine Tohmé as curator. Staged under the theme ‘The Three-Legged Cat’, the event is set to unfold over three years, encompassing exhibitions, live performances and screenings, workshops and the creation of an academy. Following an open call – the first in over a decade -a blessedly concise 47 artists were selected for the initial salvo, which spans eight sites in a relatively small, walkable radius. The biennial's solidaristic anti-genocide position was made clear in both Tohmé's and Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) chairman Ömer M. Koç's impassioned speeches at the press conference and…

The fourth iteration of the Okayama Art Summit, ‘The Parks of Aomame’, draws its title from the dimension-crossing hitwoman in Haruki Murakami's novel 1Q84 (2009–10). Just as the character Aomame traverses multiple realities, the exhibition, which is led by French artistic director Philippe Parreno and set in civic, commercial and office spaces across the city, explores the idea of parallel worlds. As the imagined realms proposed by a – primarily Western – cohort of artists, musicians, scientists and others meet the real-world circumstances of the city, the vision of fantasy that emerges is at times strange, at times beautiful and often off-putting. For example, Parreno's giant cybernetic tower, Membrane (2024), erected in a former elementary school's athletic field, is an eyesore that closely resembles a vertical-drop roller coaster. The artwork…

JENNY HARRIS Let's talk about ‘The Shape of Shape’, which opened at the Museum of Modern Art [MoMA], New York, in 2019. AMY SILLMAN Sure! I'd gotten a call from Ann Temkin [chief curator of Painting and Sculpture] and Michelle Kuo [chief curator at large], inviting me to curate an ‘Artist's Choice’ exhibition at MoMA, drawing on the museum's collection. In response, I suggested a show about shape. It was a kind of provocation – I felt like they'd never do it. Shape is so basic. But amazingly, they were interested! The lead time was short. I had to leave New York in three weeks to teach in Germany for the summer. But Ann said, ‘Give it a try; if it doesn't work out, it's okay.’ The show would take…

When the sun sets, Derek Fordjour's ‘Nightsong’ springs to life. On view at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles from 6pm to 10pm each evening, the show presents a multisensory exploration of Black cultural production. A narrative musical structure created with producer Omar Edwards unfolds in four acts through each hour of the night cycle, enveloping viewers in years of Black musical tradition. Designed with architect Kulapat Yantrasast, the gallery's dim lighting, theatrical curtains and spotlit artworks underpin this celebration of Black artistry as a critical mode of resistance to the erasure of Black histories. The exhibition opens with a tribute, in the form of ‘master copies’, to 19th- and 20th-century Black visual artists who paved the way for Fordjour, including Henry Ossawa Tanner, whose The Banjo Lesson (1893) nods…

For centuries, sundry superstitions have stalked the mineral of salt. Beliefs persist in Europe that spilling salt is a bad omen, a sign that a demon might be lurking behind your shoulder, ready to abscond with your soul. In the Old Testament, Lot's wife alchemized into a pillar of salt for daring to look back at the burning Sodom and Gomorrah – inverting legends of ancient armies spreading salt across the territory they had pillaged, scorching the earth. There's something ironic about salt's association with destruction and decay, since it is actually a tool for preservation. Growing up, my family had a salt-related ritual of our own: each weekend, my dad would buy blocks of salt to soften the water on our rural property to prevent the pipes from prematurely…

The ontological distance between body and flow of data has become minimal for Lu Yang, whose recent videos can be said to be technologically sophisticated Buddhist agitprop. The artist's exhibition at Amant, ‘DOKU! DOKU! DOKU!: samsara. exe’, presents three videos – made with motion capture, 3D animation, game engines and artificial intelligence – that stage various timelines, scenarios and scenographies for Lu Yang's digital avatar, DOKU, who, after much indulgence, realizes that Buddhist truths lie beyond the world of appearances, and embodiment, even when assisted by advanced technology, is ultimately frivolous. The single-channel videos DOKU the Self (2022) and DOKU the Flow (2024) play on LED wall panels installed in a deserted garden scene. The latter is flanked by Galsang Aspiration Prayer (Dzogchen Pema Tashi Rinpoche) (2024): seven suspended strips…

‘Stay away or I'll jump!’ Flora threatens from the precipice of an on-screen cliff. This is as much a warning to the viewer as it is to the soldier – now out of frame – who has chased her to this point in his attempts to convince her to marry him. The admonishment aimed at the viewer, however, is a call to keep their distance from questioning the narrative unfolding before them and the influence of the medium through which it is being communicated. This tense moment unfolds across three of the five sequences that comprise Stan Douglas's five-channel film installation Birth of a Nation (2025), on view at Victoria Miro, London. The work's title is drawn from its source material, the infamous 1915 silent film The Birth of a…

When reading about the works of Hayley Tompkins, two words frequently crop up: ‘everyday’ and ‘paint’. Both are, in a sense, self-explanatory. Tompkins's practice, however, is far from straightforward. The works in ‘Surroundings’, her solo exhibition at The Modern Institute, Glasgow, are tricky in the best way. On view is a new series of acrylic on gesso panel paintings, along with painted organic and textile found objects that seem frozen in a moment of high energy, as if pinned to the gallery walls for only a fleeting second. These works conjure the space in which you find yourself upon waking from a vivid dream, where everything is almost – but not quite -real. Consider three sticks hung on one of the walls: Stick XXX, XXI, XXIV (all works 2025). The…

‘Fashion is instant language,’ designer Miuccia Prada said in a 2007 interview with The Wall Street Journal. Artist Chalisée Naamani takes up the garment's expressive power in her ‘vêtements-images’ (clothing-images), as she terms them: assemblages that incorporate reclaimed apparel and accessories to achieve a form of soft sculpture stripped of wearability. In these works, second-hand items are remixed as striking, impractical surfaces and allusive amalgamations – a process the Palais de Tokyo in Paris equated with the ‘ultra-Baroque aesthetics of Instagram’ in the museum notes accompanying an exhibition by the artist this summer. Naamani mines the art of getting dressed to address questions around the performativity of identity and the turmoil of global consumerism. The labels inside the clothes she has refashioned state ‘Made with Love’ – which, within the…

If, like me, you were a teenager in the 1990s, you might have a soft spot for all things talk show: the padded armchairs illuminated by spotlights, the stage designed like an inviting but not-too-grand living room, the rows of chairs for a studio audience poised to ask provocative questions as presenters like Ricki Lake, Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Springer adjudicated. Such is the scene of Jordan Strafer's DISSONANCE Set (2025), the installation that opens her eponymous exhibition at Fluentum. The museum itself, a vast hall of black marble complete with columns and sweeping staircases, occupies part of a complex built between 1936 and 1938 as the district headquarters of the Nazi Luftwaffe. Here, during Berlin Art Week, Strafer filmed DISSONANCE (2025), which depicts a talk show hosted by a…

‘Danzante’, June Crespo's solo exhibition at the Secession in Vienna, follows the same logic as her sculptures: it presents a composite body whose elements remain open to constant reconfiguration. The title itself – meaning ‘dancer’ or ‘dancing’ in Spanish – emphasizes movement and relationality. The space functions as a metaphorical dance floor where visitors, artworks and architecture waltz together. When I first step inside, I find myself hesitating in the face of the exhibition's spaciousness, my mind going blank. In the accompanying text, Crespo explains: ‘I don't want to cement an image, but propose an encounter between bodies, in the in-between.’ The concept of the in-between – the fluid, liminal space of encounter – is central to Crespo's work, as it reflects her ongoing questioning of edges and boundaries, beginning…

The underrepresentation of female artists, especially in earlier decades, is hardly news. Yet each exhibition that strives to shed light on women's artistic careers and rebalance the scales uncovers stories that fascinate. At Dhahran's King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra), the group show ‘Horizon in Their Hands: Women Artists from the Arab World (1960s–1980s)’ delves into the rich output of 50 female artists across the MENA region. Created in collaboration with the UAE-based Barjeel Art Foundation and curated by Rémi Homs, the exhibition presents more than 70 artworks that often straddle the fine line between art and handcraft, a tension that defined many female practices in the 20th century. Several pieces have never before been publicly exhibited, including Mounirah Mosly's The Young Woman (2010), where printed textile fragments are…

I HAD ALMOST OVERLOOKED IT. I was standing outside the Palais de Tokyo, where a plaque for Cameron Rowland's Replacement (2025) read: ‘The French flag on the façade of Palais de Tokyo is replaced by the flag of Martinique.’ In red, black and green – colours worn as a symbol of resistance in the French overseas department since the 17th century -the fabric draped loosely down the mast, its folds abstracting the design and calling to mind the Pan-African and Palestinian flags. The next day, Rowland's work was gone, and a new statement announced that the flag ‘could be considered illegal’ – without explaining why. One possible explanation: in 2024, France sent antiriot police to the island to stop protests against almost 400 years of French colonial rule. When the…

Many years ago, an editor made a note to me in all caps: ‘STOP REHASHING IDEAS FROM THE ‘70s!’, highlighting something about a panopticon, or a spectacle, or in any case a felt sense that the obscure academic terms I was so excited to discover were, by the time of my discovery, becoming reified as everyday life. I was jolted back to that memory at the press preview for ‘Made in L.A. 2025’ while listening to curators Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha describe John Knight's 1974 minimalist-to-the-max sculpture Quiet Quality as a framework for the entire exhibition. Positioning that work in this way seemed less a rehash than an appraisal of its prescience, one that cast a pallor over a show that risks communicating a vision of what the art…

The path through Suzanne Jackson's retrospective ‘What Is Love’ is structured by the various places in which she has lived: San Francisco; Fairbanks, Alaska; Savannah, Georgia; New Haven, Connecticut and other locations around the US. I first encountered Jackson through Kellie Jones's pioneering scholarship on Black artists working in Los Angeles in the 1960s and ‘70s; upon winding my way through the exhibition, however, this association between the artist and any one scene or school was supplanted by a general impression of passage as the pivotal heuristic for approaching Jackson's practice. This is all the more appropriate given the formal character of the paintings themselves. Across the span of the exhibition, which takes us from the late 1960s to work from the past few years, Jackson demonstrates manifold ways of…

Birthdays can be polarizing occasions: celebratory, on the one hand, and provoking oft-unwanted self-reflection, on the other. As she approached her fortieth year, fibre artist Erin M. Riley found herself ruminating on memories of childhood and the meaning of home. These reflections were fodder for the large-scale, hand-woven tapestries on view at P·P·O·W in ‘Life Looks Like a House For a Few Hours’. Working with wool and cotton, Riley expertly transformed imagery sourced from her personal life, the internet and newspapers into textiles that are palpably tense and emotionally charged. A number of these compositions portray Riley clad in lingerie, revealing tattoos across her body. Her depictions of selfies and risqué laptop photos focus on specific parts – hands, buttocks, torso. At the same time, she often renders a less…

How sustainable is the current moment? ‘One Hundred Years’, Abbas Akhavan's exhibition at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia (UBC), asks the audience to suspend both belief and their sense of time. The show of installations by the Montreal and Berlin-based artist, who will represent Canada at the 2026 Venice Biennale, considers the fictions and mechanisms that shape our subjectivities. In so doing, it reveals ways in which imposed binaries, both natural and constructed, are foundational to the structure of the art world, which instrumentalizes such divides to sustain looping narratives. Entering the room, one emerges onto a stage shared with several human-sized Monstera deliciosa plants (Studio, 2025). In light of its role as a visual motif in the works of Henri Matisse…

Go Ye Afar (2025), the latest video work by Irish artist Frank Sweeney, opens with a shot of a taxi on the mountains overlooking Dublin, lights full beam on a statue of a saint draped in rosary beads. The film follows an Irish Nigerian taxi driver on the night shift, his car weaving through eerie rural roads and eventually a matrix of urban underpasses as the meter ticks upwards. The streets of Dublin blur with those of Calabar, southern Nigeria, in a haunting dream tapestry of vivid visual textures and magical realism where here bleeds into there, the present into the past. Radio waves permeate the boundary between the cab and the outside world through the low drone of commentators. The car is breached, too, by the entry of each…

What is the purpose of telling time? For millennia, people have used sundials to observe the length of the day and, by extension, the rhythms of labour and sleep. According to Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen, accurate timekeeping was crucial in medieval Chinese society. Yet ‘Zhezong, a Song Chinese emperor, was interested in cosmic [time], not our mundane time,’ Ho explained during a press tour of his latest exhibition. Transcending the ordinary is precisely what the multimedia artist attempts in ‘2 stories: voids & times’, at neugerriemschneider in Berlin. Here, Ho is focused less on measuring moments than on folding them: bending chronology, manipulating space and reviving contested histories through technology. The show opens with Voice of Void (2021), an expansive two-room installation offering a direct confrontation with Japanese philosophy,…

The theme of Isaac Chong Wai's latest exhibition flickers right at you in bright white neon as the lift opens into Hong Kong's Blindspot Gallery. The words ‘falling’ and ‘carefully’ blink in turn, then together; the adverb's Cantonese equivalent, ‘小 心地跌倒’, flashes on the wall nearby. The first of half of that word, ‘小心’, is uttered frequently in this city and has many meanings, from ‘beware’ to ‘take care’. Chong, who is based between Berlin and Hong Kong, is better known for his performances than for semantics. His show, ‘carefully’, which roughly coincides with his inclusion in the 2025 Taipei Biennial, showcases recent neon sculptures, glass etchings, drawings and prints as well as a video performance work. Chong's art is often made in response to efforts to find solidarity in…

What can we make of the legacies we did not choose, yet continue to live with? This question underlies ‘sent in spun found’, a two-person exhibition featuring New York-based Gi (Ginny) Huo and Seoul-based Cha Yeonså at DOOSAN Gallery in Seoul. Through installation, drawing and video, the artists work through what has been handed down -Huo, from a family history of migration and religious faith, and Cha from the material remnants of a deceased father – to consider how the inheritances that befall us might generate forms of care, resistance and renewal. Huo's and Cha's practices are not obviously aligned: the former distils her journeys with quiet precision, while the latter lets emotion spill into more tactile forms. The works share the space without clear division, forming an unlikely but…