Table of contents for Issue 242 - April 2024 in Frieze

DRAWING ITS TITLE from a 2005 series of neon works by Palermo-based collective Claire Fontaine – appropriated, in turn, from an activist group that creatively opposed racism and xenophobia in early-2000s Turin – ‘Foreigners Everywhere’ will address themes of colonization, migration and diaspora. The titular phrase – stranieri ovunque in Italian – will no doubt sound ironically familiar to local Venetians. Not only are tourists, quite literally, everywhere in Venice, but the unceasing exodus of residents has transformed a city once-famous for its neighbourly conviviality into one of transitory passers-by. In 2023, The Guardian reported that more than half the beds on the island of Venice are currently dedicated to tourists. This progressive displacement of the local population has been encouraged by government bodies permitting the alteration of the urban function…

BRAZIL'S INDIGENOUS PEOPLES will play a major role at this year's Venice Biennale. In his curatorial statement, Adriano Pedrosa stressed that the Indigenous communities of his native Brazil, though predating Portuguese colonizers as original inhabitants, are often treated like foreigners. It's a paradoxical exclusion, considering how widely Brazil's national identity – in, for instance, Romantic literature or the modernist anthropophagic movement – draws on Indigenous tropes. More than 300 Indigenous idioms are spoken throughout the country, and to highlight this, the Brazilian pavilion at this year's biennial has been renamed Hãhãwpuá, meaning Great Land in the Pataxó language. Indigenous contemporary art from Brazil will be further featured in the Giardini with works by the Huni Kuin Artists Movement (MAHKU), which will paint a monumental mural on the entire facade of…

The oily-looking clumps of matter scattered across EXILE's ground-floor gallery glimmer ominously. Nschotschi Haslinger might call these creatures Wächter (Guardians, 2023), but there is nothing protective or stately about them. Rather, their black metallic surfaces and tiny eyes remind us of aliens from a sci-fi movie or the hazardous by-products of industry. With their ugly formlessness, they appear more like tired anti-heroes at the service of a dark force than noble saviours coming to the rescue in a time of need. In ‘Symptom Couverture’, her second solo show at EXILE, Haslinger explores the ubiquitous malaise of exhaustion through the destabilizing power of the grotesque. Mixing symbols of capitalism, pop culture and spirituality, this minimal show concentrates on a handful of small ceramic pieces presented directly on the gallery floor. While…

You can hear the screams and the music before you even enter the gallery. Emanating from the 11-minute video Heart Is a Broken Record (2023), by Berlinbased Chinese artist Shuang Li, they form the soundtrack to a montage of footage shot at My Chemical Romance concerts by fans and uploaded onto YouTube. It's easy to imagine the young girls who made these films crammed together at the front of the stage, willing their heroes to appear. By only using footage from the moments leading up to the start of the concerts, the artist creates an atmosphere heavy with longing for an event that, in her version, never transpires. The work alternates these scenes with images of blood spots, veins and lava pouring out of a volcano: a climax of organic…

Wanda Coleman is a poet's poet, known for her biting lyricism and deeply felt explorations of the quotidian and personal. Alternately dubbed ‘the LA Blueswoman’ (by poet Tim Joyce) and ‘LA's unofficial poet laureate’ (by the Los Angeles Times in her 2013 obituary), her raw vulnerability and unwavering resilience recently inspired artist Cauleen Smith to turn Coleman's work into a collaborative songbook. Featuring ten musical artists and bands – Kelsey Lu, Shala Miller, moor mother and Aquiles Navarro, Meshell Ndegeocello, Jeff Parker and Ruby Parker, Alice Smith, and Jamila Woods and Standing on the Corner – the resulting EP, The Wanda Coleman Songbook, like the eponymous exhibition it spawned (both 2024), is a remarkably tender ode to both the late poet and her native city. Smith, who grew up in…

At Casa Iramaia in São Paulo – an early modernist house that appears to float on piloti supports – spirits dance on the threshold of life and death. ‘Evocações’ (Evocations) – an exhibition presented by Mendes Wood DM at this architecturally significant off-site venue – features works by the late Brazilian artist Ismael Nery and contemporary British painter Lewis Hammond. The building's usually sundrenched, white interior has been metamorphosed into a labyrinth of partition walls, painted moss green and deep blue. Although Hammond was not familiar with Nery's work before the show – the pairing was proposed by exhibition curator Germano Dushá – the two artists find common ground in their allegorical portrait paintings that, dense with mystery and symbolism, irradiate the broad possibilities of our complex existence. Nery's Retrato…

Over the past two decades, Heman Chong has made a name for himself by repurposing conceptual-art strategies to play out fictive scenarios that point to unseen realities and possible worlds. In the performance Memories (2009–ongoing), for instance, participants commit to memory short stories, written by Chong, that will never be published in print. His current mini-survey, ‘Meditations on Shadow Libraries’ at STPI Creative Workshop & Gallery, finds the artist exploring themes of property, commons and oblivion through deft gestures that upend expectations about where the substance of the work lies. The first gallery is overtaken by the The Library of Unread Books (2016–ongoing), made in collaboration with Renée Staal. Visually, this work resembles any flea market bookstand, with titles spanning from literary classics (James Joyce's Ulysses, 1922) to pulp fiction…

I MET THE SWEDISH-CANTONESE ARTIST Lap-See Lam in 2019, when I was a curatorial fellow at Performa Biennial in New York. Lam, then a student at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, developed a piece for the biennial entitled Phantom Banquet (2019), which included a Cheetos-like snack, an immersive VR installation and a live performance by members of the Columbus Park Senior Orchestra. Lam is now at the helm of another multivalent project, The Altersea Opera, commissioned by Moderna Museet for the Nordic Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. Birthed from her ongoing exploration into the cultural imaginary of Chinese restaurants in the Cantonese diaspora, the project expands into a new chapter, navigating the turbulent waters of loss and cultural reclamation along with her chosen collaborators: Norwegian composer Tze…

In 1968, Danish artist and activist Palle Nielsen turned Stockholm's Moderna Museet into a space solely for children to play in. They could swing on tyres, clamber over wooden frames, participate in arts and crafts or join in with music sessions. Nielsen's aim for his project, titled ‘The Model – A Model for a Qualitative Society’, was to explore how children's creative play might inspire a more harmonious society, based on communication rather than competition. Inspired by Nielsen's experiment, MUDAM's three-part exhibition, ‘A Model’, unites more than 30 artists and collectives in a similar pursuit: to challenge and reimagine the museum's role in contemporary society. Whilst Nielsen's optimistic project was very much a product of its time, MUDAM's current director, Bettina Steinbrügge, has a comparable ambition for this programme –…

The 14 mixed-media works on paper in Jan Gatewood's first UK solo show, ‘Group Relations’, all feature rabbits at war with something. In Hattie McDaniel's Powerful Lucky Rabbit's Foot (all works 2023), a bunny bursts through a tattered poster for the film Gone with the Wind (1939), its facial expression somewhere between elation and agony. The presence and activities of these detailed protagonists, alongside the works’ many references – including to musician Prince and Uncle Ruckus from the animated US sitcom The Boondocks (2005–14) – indicate that the artist is contending with the weight of the past. Gatewood's animal protagonists often recall Br'er Rabbit, a character from African American and Caribbean folklore who embodies the playful trickster archetype commonly associated with rabbits, the best-known example of which is Bugs Bunny…

Suspended in mid-air at the heart of the brutalist cavern that is The Douglas Hyde Gallery, the monumental white lion, first viewed from above as you enter the gallery, might almost be sculpted from gravity-defying marble. Closer inspection, however, reveals Medici Lion (all works 2023) to be composed of buckled-together sections of what is, in fact, 3D-printed polylactide. Hovering about half a metre above the concrete floor, this grandiose emblem of compromised majesty is tautly tethered to opposing gallery walls by an extended harness of black military webbing. Absurdly commanding, it looms over the gallerygoers circling it in the surrounding gloom. True to form for Hapaska, the fettered colossus has a ramifying back story. The ‘original’ Medici Lions were a pair of marble sculptures – one ancient, one a renaissance…

The first museum survey devoted to Auriea Harvey – a relentlessly experimental artist who was prescient about digital media's capacity to reshape experiences of intimacy and embodiment – is overdue but worth the wait. Chronologically charting nearly four decades of the artist's work with emergent technologies, ‘My Veins Are the Wires, My Body is Your Keyboard’ encompasses net art, video games and digital sculpture, contextualized with sketchbooks and ephemera. Explorations of worldbuilding lore (in games and life) and the interpenetration of the virtual and the physical constitute compelling throughlines, as pivots in media that coincide with phenomena like the rise of Web 2.0 or Gamergate suggest a shuttling between enchantment with technology's possibilities and disillusionment with its uses. Projected at the exhibition's mouth, Webcam Movies (2021) scales up glitchy, black…

As a five year old, one of my most prized possessions was the soundtrack to Beauty and the Beast (1991). I demanded the cassette be played every day on the long drive to school, with a favourite song being the paean to Gallic hospitality, ‘Be Our Guest’. There are no singing candlesticks and dancing plates here, but ‘Guest Relations’ weaves a similarly delightful spell. Curated by Murtaza Vali with Lucas Morin, the exhibition considers the impacts of touristification. While drawing broadly from the Global South, it focuses especially on Dubai and its sister city states in the Gulf, where these transformations have been particularly intense. Its five sections move from the built environment to affective infrastructures of hospitality: how they provide and how they take away. The first gallery addresses…

IN 2018, I spent a summer in Berlin, renting a room in Kreuzberg, a neighbourhood historically populated by Turkish Gastarbeiter – economic migrants who moved to West Germany after World War II to fill severe labour shortages. By the late 2010s, Kreuzberg was mostly inhabited by their descendants, a Turkish-German diaspora of more than three million people, under threat of displacement by encroaching tech companies. Laser-focused as I was on the particularities of my own Asian diaspora, it wasn't until after I met my boyfriend, Ekin, who is Turkish, that I became aware of this history. In 1983, Nil Yalter had a solo show at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, the city in which she had been living since 1965. The exhibition centred around video installations of documentary interviews…

STONES, BONES and invented languages – with a side of sweet potatoes – lie at the heart of Abdullah Al Saadi's prolific, itinerant practice. For more than 40 years, he has traversed the craggy, petroglyph-dotted mountains around his Khor Fakkan home, immersing himself in nature and collecting discarded items along the way. He meticulously documents these extended trips through sketches and writing that, along with the found objects, form the bedrock of his multivalent work, which ranges from psychographic painting and photography to performance and sculptural assemblage. Back at his studio, the inveterate collector meticulously dates and classifies his findings in large metal trunks, which constitute an ongoing archive of fast-eroding folkways and the natural environment. Al Saadi's taxonomic impulses underwrite his work, which is imbued with the self-conscious sadness…

When it opened its doors in 1984, Café Krasnapolsky embodied the cultural zeitgeist of 1980s Copenhagen. Clad in cement, steel and glass, the New York-style cafe quickly became the favoured haunt of writers such as Poul Borum and Carsten Jensen who, alongside a host of Danish artists and intellectuals, could often be found propping up the distinctive oval bar, vying to see and be seen. For ‘Showers’, his solo exhibition at Lagune Ouest, Mathias Toubro has conjured the memory of this legendary space, transposing the bar's essence into the minimalist, white cube gallery. It's a restrained appraisal that avoids garish re-enactment, but whose elusive signposts might leave some visitors mystified. Nodding to the video art and installations that continually occupied Krasnapolsky, for instance, are three old-fashioned televisions. All three screen…

To see Tim Pitsiulak's drawings in ‘Long Looking’ at the Art Gallery of Guelph, visitors must first traverse mirrored silhouettes of Kinngait (Inuktitut for ‘where the hills are'), the rolling landscape that gives its name to the town where the late artist lived and worked. The black-painted terrain stretches more than two metres up the gallery walls. Above the ridgelines, curator Taqralik Partridge has arranged, salon style, a selection of more than 60 works on paper by Inuit artists from the gallery's collection, including drawings by Shuvinai Ashoona, Victoria Mamnguqsualuk and Irene Avaalaaqiaq Tiktaalaaq. At the opening, Partridge described how ‘convention is to value work by giving it space. This presentation – in an at-home, Inuit way, in relation – values the work differently.’ Pitsiulak's drawings – luminous compositions of…

Recently, I diagnosed myself with trypophobia, or the fear of small holes. I took the diagnostic on TikTok after visiting Cristina Iglesias's latest exhibition, ‘Ellipsis’, at Marian Goodman, Los Angeles. The test had five images, including a picture of a hand riddled with tiny, round lesions and a close-up of a strawberry. They all evoked feelings of terror and disgust, sensations that experts say are linked to what these holes suggest: a flimsy boundary between one dimension and another, proximity to the unknown. Iglesias's work picks at similar fears, moulding earthy materials into alien forms: a porous meteorite fills with liquid from an invisible source (Lunar Meteorite [Littoral], 2023); a gravel mass becomes a rocky cyclone, carving a deep crater into one gallery wall (Turbulence, 2023). These geologic fissures appear…

Titled ‘The Open World’, the third edition of the Thailand Biennale is held in the northern province of Chiang Rai. Assembled by an all-Thai curatorial team, the government-supported biennial is led by artistic directors Rirkrit Tiravanija and Gridthiya Gaweewong in tandem with co-curators Angkrit Ajchariyasophon and Manuporn Luengaram. In Thai, the biennial's title also evokes the act of opening oneself up to the world – an effort by the curators, perhaps, to encourage the government's support of the Golden Triangle region bordering Laos and Myanmar, in which Chiang Rai is located. The curatorial team approached the historical and ethnographical complexity of the biennial's location with caution, flirting with grand national narratives, while also highlighting the discursive cultural legacies that have been suppressed by modernization. At the heart of Chiang Rai,…