Table of contents for Issue 241 - March 2024 in Frieze

In 2019, Meredith Lackey released a short film, Cablestreet, which documented the manufacture and installation of an undersea fibre-optic cable by the Chinese company Huawei Technologies. Cablestreet is much more than a documentary; it is a poetic speculation on the subjecthood of machines and the non-linearity of technological time. Lackey is now working on her first feature-length film, scheduled for release in 2025. JONATHAN GRIFFIN We’re communicating via Signal – a secure messaging app I haven’t used before. Why do your activities necessitate this mode of communication? MEREDITH LACKEY My mentor, a former war reporter, trained me on encrypted comms and information best practices about a decade ago – particularly necessary in countries with low levels of information freedom, like China and Cambodia. Thanks to him, encrypted comms are now…

ON 1 MARCH 1999, a sound with an unknown source was picked up on the eastern equatorial Pacific autonomous hydrophone array. Without clear evidence of origin, the sound was named by ear and, likened to a woman’s voice, the obscure sonic event became known as Julia. I forget how I first heard about Julia or listened to the brief sighing call of the record, but ‘she’ has stayed with me, a ghost note in my auditory ambivalence to the document and its illusion of fixity. Because, while the audio record is one take of a moment in time and space, it is far from still, coherent or stable – its source and subject often far from knowable. Writing is one way of moving closer to what is always in retreat.…

According to its curatorial mission statement, ‘Cosmos Cinema’ – the 14th edition of the Shanghai Biennale – seeks to position film not only as a storytelling medium, but as a ‘cosmic phenomenon with the potential to change our understanding of the universe and our place within it’. It’s an ambitious aim, yet chief curator Anton Vidokle delivers a sharp show with abundant references to Soviet cosmology, which can be read as an extension of his own film trilogy Immortality for All (2014–17), at a time when a non-occidental perspective feels all-the-more pertinent given that we are living, once again, in a Cold War. At the entrance to the exhibition is a series of sculptures by Trevor Paglen, including Prototype for a Nonfunctional Satellite, Design 4 Build 4 (2015–18) – a…

For 20 years, Kwan Sheung Chi has pursued an apparently fruitless endeavour in his native Hong Kong: challenging power with acts of absolute mundanity. He has tried to drink hot chocolate with a fork, domesticized a flag-raising ceremony and performed an ‘A to Z’ of failed suicides, aligning the futility of making work with daily living under unchosen politics. His latest solo show, ‘Not retrospective’, staged across three rooms at Kiang Malingue, can be startlingly melancholic but then idles in its continuation of this effort. The first gallery presents a concise overview of Kwan’s practice – albeit minus his more political projects. The earliest work on display here is a selection of exercise books from the series ‘I Am Artist’ (2003–04), in which Kwan repeatedly scrawled the titular phrase, either…

‘And the Human, Stuck in a Permanent State of Smelling like Dirt,’ reads the AI-authored statement greeting visitors to Berlin-based artist Johanna Hedva’s solo exhibition, ‘If You’re Reading This, I’m Already Dead’, curated by Suzy Halajian at JOAN, Los Angeles. The candid physicality of this opening proclamation hints at the show ahead: a series of assemblages formed from, among other things: knives previously thrown at the walls of Berlin’s Gropius Bau as part the 2022 group exhibition ‘YOY!! Care, Repair, Heal’; a fake pelvis bone; a mouth-blown glass vessel filled with black pigment; and organic matter including the artist’s hair, blood and saliva. By interweaving these elements, Hedva creates a self-contained universe composed of distinct, raw works that – straddling political and spiritual realms – reflect the artist’s efforts to…

Caution: animal crossing. A flurry of six, stampeding, four-legged animals, frozen mid-run, serves as the entry to ‘The Snow Falls Slowly in Paradise’ – a fitting pairing of Lin May Saeed’s zoological sculptures with works by her 20th century antecedent, modernist sculptor Renée Sintenis. At the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin, Sintenis’s bronze oxen, camels and gazelles from another era affectionately nuzzle with Saeed’s expressively rendered, near-life-size Pangolin, Calf and Anteater (all 2020), giving a sense of exhilaration, and even urgency, to this playful exhibition with serious undertones. Saeed, who died this year at the age of 50, made animal liberation, ecological responsibility and human-animal relations the focus of her own too-brief life. Her work has a weightlessness buoyed by the unexpected levity she finds in such otherwise heavy themes.…

‘The Offering Formula’, a monographic exhibition presenting work made by Charlie Prodger over a 14-year period, takes its title from a 2023 pencil drawing of a clear plastic box, on which is written a list of female names. Many – Agnes, Nancy, Ursula – seem to belong to artists and writers, perhaps those Prodger perceives to be her forebearers. Inside this box is a trove of hard drives bearing those names. An unlikely self-portrait, which withholds as much as it reveals, the drawing is a window into the artist’s work in its purest state: data and everyday ephemera. This description might be applied to several works in this richly rewarding exhibition at Secession, which brings into focus Prodger’s crossdisciplinary and long-term inquiries into how experience and memory can travel between…

Organized by Mark Leckey, the group show ‘In The Offing’ features works by 13 artists, musicians and videographers that respond to the exhibition title – a nautical expression denoting the meeting of sea, sky and shore – alongside a new video by the artist. At the press preview, Leckey discussed the town’s two symbolic poles: Turner Contemporary, a gallery founded in 2011, often cited as a gentrifying force, and Dreamland, a fairground established in 1880. Using the latter to unpack his working-class past, the artist suggested that – inculcated in a middle-class, artworld sensibility – he no longer felt like visiting the amusement park. The dichotomy Leckey evoked between Dreamland’s crudeness and what he described as ‘difficult’ fine art is a gap he seeks to bridge here, reckoning with his…

THERE IS AN IMPRESSIVE RANGE to the frameworks Dominique White uses to engage with bodies of water. There is the nautical Afrofuturism of Detroit-based techno duo Drexciya (Gerald Donald and James Stinson). Another is Duke University Press, specifically the Black, feminist or nihilist thinkers on their roster such as Katherine McKittrick, Christina Sharpe and Calvin L. Warren. White’s YouTube algorithm recently recommended a video on how deserted lobster traps, crab cages and discarded fishing nets can combine to become naval mines. Likewise, social media has been generative as a source of information. When we meet in late 2023, she refers me to a series of TikTok videos titled ‘Haunted Hydrology’, produced by researcher and artist Geo Rutherford: ‘This person just tells incredible stories of natural phenomena or myths and legends…

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In the aftermath of the #MeToo movement and the revocation of Roe v. Wade, the idea of rescuing women through their visuality appears to have reached a critical fatigue – at least in leftist circles in the US. But French-Egyptian-American artist Ghada Amer remains determined to iterate the need for women to pursue liberation in the symbolic and psychic realms as well as in their lived experience. The artist’s latest show, ‘Paravent Girls’ at Tina Kim Gallery, presents a new body of work that continues her lifelong investigation into women’s representation. The exhibition opens with a demonstration of Amer’s sculptural process: Study for Sculpture 4 (2021) is the outline of a woman, copied from a pornographic magazine, painted onto cardboard. The artist creates her bronze works from these paintings by…

In the early 2000s, my graduate programme (like many) was preoccupied by poststructural French theory and its rehashing of classical motifs. One discussion focused on how the Greek term oikos (whose tripartite meaning encompasses family, property and home) had come to describe a dispersed domesticity of uncertain grounding, articulated by the moveable, transient fires around which people gather in the street. Over the last few years, Colombian artist Carlos Alfonso has fashioned such oikos in the form of a series of earthen clay ovens that have become sites for making, cooking, knowledge-sharing and creating alternative social formations. Instantiations of these vessels have moved across disparate venues for emerging art practices in Bogotá – FLORA ars+natura in 2019 and PIEDRAPIEDRAPIEDRA in 2022 – before arriving in its current fragmented state at…

I’ve never had insomnia, but Steven Shearer’s paintings are a good indication of what it must feel like. Red-eyed, his protagonists stare pleadingly out at the viewer or hide from their gaze under veils of lank hair, shoulders hunched, cigarette in mouth. Rendered with luminous blue-, yellow- and green-tinged skin, these men – visually coded as artist and musician types through their personal style and twilight activities – are clearly in need of some quality shut-eye. Curated by Dieter Roelstraete in collaboration with the artist and Skarlet Smatana, ‘Sleep, Death’s own Brother’ brings together works from the holdings of The George Economou Collection under the ‘transgressive thematic perspective of the lifeless body’, according to exhibition materials. These include several oil paintings for which the Vancouver-based artist is best known, such…

Like splatters of primordial soup on the walls of a well-to-do home, the organic forms and colours of Dominique Fung’s works sit incongruously alongside the chandeliered ceilings and ornate fixtures of MASSIMODECARLO’s London space. At the gallery entrance, To Pull Out Ancestral Memories (all works 2023) is a large painting of a soft-edged platform the colour of girolle mushrooms, which floats above two seaweed-green, perforated rocks. Flowers, seashells, ammonites and pearl-bearing oysters grow from it on thin stems, their delicate roots held in place by hands that emerge from holes in the rocks. The scene is suspended in a shiny slick of black oil paint that makes it look like it’s taking place at the bottom of the ocean. Wherever it is, Fung’s is a fertile land. The wiry-stemmed, various-headed…

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YOKO ONO’S Film No. 4 (Bottoms) (1966–67) was banned by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) in March 1967, before it was due to premiere at the Royal Albert Hall. Recorded at the London townhouse of the art dealer and poet Victor Musgrave, the 80-minute, 16mm, black and white film was an extended version of Film No. 4 (Fluxfilm No. 16) (1966), shot in her Manhattan apartment with a group of friends. Her instructive event score was simple: ‘String bottoms together in place of signatures for petition of peace.’ Both films have the same highly mediated, repetitive structure: a sequence of naked bottoms are captured by a stationary camera in a controlled, tight-framed close-up. A new pair of buttocks fills the screen every 15 seconds, moving rhythmically as the individual…

BERLIN IN THE NOUGHTIES KEN OKIISHI It should be remembered that, when someone found out you had moved to Berlin from New York, the first question was always: ‘But why would you want to live in this horrible place?’ DAN BODAN When I relocated here from Montreal, during the final dregs of the 2000s with its techno parties and bohemian cafes, real estate was still incredibly cheap. My rent was only EU€50 per month. CALLA HENKEL People had a lot of time. If you came as an American and you were able to get an artist’s visa, you could slide into a very low-maintenance life where you could be an artist and not have to have a bunch of side jobs. KAREN ARCHEY A friend of mine once said Berlin…

‘Small World’, the title of the Taipei Biennial 2023, contains both a promise and a threat. It speaks to a stricken, shrinking and interconnected planet but also to a sense of insularity, intimacy and proximity. As with most biennials, the size of the curatorial task at hand – structuring a sprawling show across three floors of the Fine Arts Museum, featuring 58 artists and 120 individual works – calls for a conceit broad enough to feel encompassing but specific enough to hold critical sway. This iteration – curated by Freya Chou, Reem Shadid and Brian Kuan Wood – errs towards a looser application of curatorial authority in a refreshing departure from the more theoretical approaches adopted by previous curators, such as Mali Wu and Francesco Manacorda in ‘PostNature – A…

Over the last decade, Tokyo-based photographer Homma Takashi – best known for his studies of suburban youth – has turned from a practice rooted in social commentary to something stranger, more atmospheric. He begins by creating large camera obscuras from blacked-out hotel rooms across Tokyo and other parts of Japan, as well as Los Angeles, Milan and New York. As light passes through a tiny ‘pinhole’ aperture incised in the window curtains, buildings and landscapes appear upside-down, projected onto the opposite wall with a flat, neutral focus. Only some of the images – the series ‘Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji’ (2016–ongoing), for instance – could be called beautiful, with soft lines and pale blue and purple tones. But even these are somewhat diminished, reminding us that the act of looking…

Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo squints her eyes and nods. She shifts her weight, changes position on a bed. Above her, nine paper lanterns the size of bean bags float, each beaming a vespertine green that floods her skin, her hair and a selection of personal items taken from her bedroom at home: a bedside table, ruffled moss rugs, an inexpensive shelving unit, a puffer jacket and a slim sweater covered with craft-store faux leaves. For her first solo institutional show, ‘Nothing New’ at the New Museum, Kuriki-Olivo (a.k.a. Puppies Puppies) has taken up residence in the lobby gallery for a durational performance that perverts and estranges our senses of sight and sound. Revelling in the playfulness of readymades, the artist has carved up the space into a railroad-style apartment with a…

‘The Beautiful Captive’ – Alexandria-born Mahmoud Khaled’s solo exhibition at Gypsum in Cairo – borrows its title from a 1931 painting by Belgian surrealist René Magritte, in which a canvas standing on an easel depicts the extended idyllic scene of its backdrop. This play on perspective – of where the painting ends and reality begins – is transposed quite literally in Khaled’s eponymous 12-part series that forms the heart of the show. The artist has photoshopped images of Alexandria’s state-owned zoo onto photographs of luxury homes to form a wallpaper of sorts. By transforming the faded architectural grandeur of the zoo into into wall decor for decadent marble bathrooms and state-of-the-art home cinema rooms, he shows the ease with which art is turned into a decorative commodity. Bookending this series…

Wildfires, mine blasts, a hurricane raging through Berlin: Annika Larsson’s latest video, Strange Powers – Prologue (2023), is a relentless montage of disaster and destruction. Interpolated among these troubling sequences of found and archival footage, however, are a number of obscure diagrams, data visualizations and short clips documenting lab experiments. Set to an eerie theremin soundtrack, much of the work is digitally processed and tinted red (an allusion to atmospheric pollution) or blue (the colour of a chemical used in quantum computers). The result is a disorienting drift of formal associations allegorized in one of the film’s more memorable scenes: a commercial jet plummeting to earth in a billowing chartreuse cloud. As the centrepiece for a show whose themes are exhaustion and systemic failure, Strange Powers – Prologue is a…

Hailed in Italy as a nonconformist artistic genius, Emilio Prini – who died in 2016 aged 73 – pursued a relentlessly conceptual practice intrinsically linked to his enigmatic and impossibly cool persona. Comprising more than 250 works installed chronologically, ‘…E Prini’ attempts to pin down the artist’s subversively ephemeral actions – which included confirming his attendance at an exhibition via telegram and communicating works of art through telepathy – but, instead, offers a seemingly unedited trove of archival documentation that threatens to overwhelm the handful of works he left behind. Like many fellow artists and students of his generation who came of age during Italy’s 1960s economic boom, Prini was anti-establishment and critical of the nascent consumerism of the era. One of the earliest works in the show is Perimetro…

Rendering PACE’s Mayfair gallery a fiendish call to the woods, the vast canvases in Paulina Olowska’s playfully titled solo show ‘Squelchy Garden Mules and Mamunas’ envelop us in sweeping Norwegian and Polish landscapes, in which youthful figures emulate Slavic folklore’s mischievous deities and demons. Olowska has long explored the role of women in image-making by appropriating and subverting their representation in fashion, art and mainstream culture, sometimes utilizing the compositions of existing images. Here, her subjects are mamunas (‘strange wife’ in Polish): swamp demons said to reside in streams, rivers and other waterways. In Olowska’s luscious paintings, they are carefree, seductive and at one with the natural world. Rod with Children and Mule (all works 2023) evokes the Slavic figure of Mokosh, or Mother Earth, through a character who lounges…