Table of contents for Issue 245 - September 2024 in Frieze

LARA MIMOSA MONTES As I reflect on your work, I'm thinking about translation, names, origins. Maybe one way for us to meet might be for me to attempt a hybrid translation of your name, Na Mira. If I translated this through the veils of our other tongues, Spanish and Korean, into English, it would mean: ‘To be lost, look’. NA MIRA Rihanna's song ‘What's My Name’ [2010] played on the radio just as I read this. The name comes from my mother, Nayop – cut in two by the US immigration office, becoming Na in 1977. The Korean word for ‘I’ is also na. I grew up between countries. I wasn't allowed to speak my first language at school in the US, and it had been outlawed during colonial rule…

GIVEN HOW MUCH of a torturous struggle it is for you, why do you continue to write? This was the final question posed to me by the audience at a recent event at a London bookshop. I had admitted to being a very slow writer – a single sentence can take weeks to complete – and to finding the entire process of writing a book almost unbearable. After an awkward silence, I replied that writing is the one area of my life where I do not have to compromise at all. My only duty is to be truthful to the content of my mind and do my bloody best to put that on the page. No wonder I reach for Gertrude Stein. She never compromised. For her, the act of…

After a greasy brunch amidst the fake trees, stained-glass flamingos and gambling machines of Las Vegas's Peppermill diner, we hit the road north for 150 kilometres. When we arrived in the tiny town of Alamo, the man who would drive us the rest of the way to Michael Heizer's City (1970–2022) didn't have much to say about the mammoth earthwork that we four Londoners had travelled so far to encounter. He did, however, want to point out two things on the map. First: Area 51, the top-secret Air Force base renowned in alien lore, whose existence went unacknowledged by the US government for decades. Second: the many craters of the nearby Nevada Test Site where, between 1951 and 1994, almost 1,000 nuclear explosions scarred the land with lunar pockmarks. As…

Judiciously spare and poetically paced, ‘Eva Hesse: Five Sculptures’ at Hauser & Wirth assembles a quintet of the German-born artist's most historically significant sculptures from 1967 to 1969, made just before her premature death from cancer, aged 34, in May 1970. Exemplifying Hesse's ability to coax absurdity and eroticism out of a min-imalism-informed commitment to seriality and industrial materials, the works on view are marked by a slow-burning strangeness that resists the potentially dampening effects of art-historical discourse (discourse which, in Hesse's case, exists in ample supply). The show highlights a celebrated period during which the artist grew adept with unorthodox materials associated with manufacturing and consumer goods, while articulating a sculptural vocabulary rooted in visual opposites and difference through repetition. Mounted in the age of museum-to-mega-gallery lending, ‘Five Sculptures’…

Photographs are often tasked with encapsulating an event, reducing it to a freeze-frame moment. For the series ‘Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction (EAPR)’ (2000–11), Mike Kelley worked in reverse, developing fictionalized screenplays from individual images plucked from his stockpile of high school yearbook photos depicting carnivalesque teenage rituals: hazings, dress-up days, pageants. Kelley displayed each video alongside reconfigured props and set elements from its own production. In 2005, he assembled 31 of these ‘stations’ into Day Is Done, a cacophonous, gymnasium-sized installation that invoked the experience of channel surfing. A single component shown on its own – as Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #8 (Singles’ Mixer) (2005–06) is presented at The Brant Foundation – functions very differently, like a delirious fever dream that can't be switched off. In the black and white…

Satan is alive and well, incarnate in the Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls of Catalina Schliebener Muñoz. Hail Satan (or, at least, his proxy). Employing a cheerfully maximalist palette not typically associated with representations of demonic pandemonium, Schliebener Muñoz continues their longstanding exploration of our societal anxieties around childhood. At the Mattress Factory, they have constructed an irreverent shrine to childhood inspired by their own upbringing; the American Right's panic over ‘grooming’ (heir to the 1980s and '90s Satanic panic, a conspiracy theory about Satanic ritual abuse); and US artist Greer Lankton's archive, part of which is housed in the museum. Schliebener Muñoz's titular installation, Deep, Deep Woods (2024), features a miscellany of plastic toys, childhood drawings, Raggedy Andy wall art, paintings with protruding jump ropes and phallic soft sculptures,…

These are leaky times. Polar ice is melting, seas are rising and rivers are breaching their banks. Institutions of every variety seem cracked and unable to hold themselves together. Nationalist politicians plot violent strategies of containment. Leaks can be good, however, when they signal the collapse of broken systems – and Gabriel Massan's Continuity Flaws: Rumors of a Leak (2024) celebrates these fissures in the late-capitalist order. Debuted as an immersive video installation at Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Continuity Flaws was co-commissioned by Serpentine Arts Technologies and Tono, the Mexico City-based festival of moving image and performance art. On six screens of differing sizes and shapes appear a randomized selection of digital animations corresponding to a video game, playable on the digital platform Steam. Colourful, spindly creatures resembling sculptures by Niki…

What does it mean to smoulder, crack open and emerge from the ashes? Such elemental and existential questions preoccupy Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga, whose inaugural solo show at Lisson Gallery contains objects, tapestries and sound installations that unite disparate materials into ritualistic compositions. In the show's titular work, We Come from Fire and Return to Fire (2024), a heavy hand-braided rope clamped with iridescent, smoked-raku ceramic beads snakes around precious stones on a hand-tufted carpet, reaching up to the skylight. The careful arrangement is at once imposing and enticing: I have to resist the urge to lie on the rug and absorb the energy of the obsidian, tourmaline and labradorite. The carpet's design was inspired by the constituent minerals of pyrargyrite: pyr and argyros being Ancient Greek for, respectively, fire…

One of the main sounds you hear while visiting MAXXI's ‘Ambienti 1956–2010: Environments by Women Artists II’ is laughter, peppered by squeals of delight or surprise. The second chapter of Haus der Kunst Munich's ambitious group show ‘Inside Other Spaces’, spotlighting radical environments created by pioneering female artists, this exhibition is the perfect playground for adults and children alike. Nineteen immersive spaces serve as anarchic portals into riotous experiments in scale, material and technology. A wall text invites viewers to engage: ‘Every experience is unique,’ it states. ‘Some transform us.' Suspended 70 centimetres above the ground like a vast hanging lantern, Tsuruko Yamazaki's Red (Shape of Mosquito Net) (1956) encourages visitors to crawl inside its translucent vinyl walls, creating a shadow-puppet effect for passing gallerygoers. Around the corner, Aleksandra Kasuba's…

To get to Karin Guenther's exhibition space, visitors must first pass through a room that doubles as an office and a storage area. The contrast between this cluttered antechamber and the refined, orderly setting of Christiane Blattmann's ‘Watersheds’ – the artist's first solo show at the Hamburg-based gallery – only serves to highlight the minimal nature of the work on display. Comprising five wall-mounted sculptures, ‘Dividers’ (all works 2024) combines industrial pipes with reddish-orange hooded jackets in a series that explores the dynamic interplay between the mediums of sculpture, painting and architecture, as well as the variability in the perception of materiality. With its serial nature and reduced colour palette, ‘Dividers’ recalls minimalist works by artists including Robert Morris and Charlotte Posenenske, in particular the latter's modular sculptures, such as…

With German, Polish and Czech influences, the historic geographical region of Lower Silesia has long been a cultural melting pot. Featuring five female artists with a deep connection to the area, ‘Giantesses’, curated by Tomek Pawłowski-Jarmołajew and Agnieszka Rayzacher at BWA Wroclaw, has been conceived as a journey through Lower Silesia's unique landscape. The exhibition, whose title plays on the name of the local Giant Mountain range, opens with a map showing where the five artists – Bozenna Biskupska, Urszula Broll, Ewa Ciepielewska, Katarzyna Rotkiewicz-Szumska and Ewa Zarzycka – have developed their practices, from a Buddhist ashram in Przesieka to the community-led Cinema Theatre in Michałowice. Broll, an abstract painter who spent the last five decades of her life in the aforementioned ashram, was a co-founder of Oneiron, a group…

AS A CHILD IN THE 1990S, I had no sense which genres were best suited to ‘becoming a writer’ – just one among the crazes that have long seduced our daughters – so I decided to contribute, gratis, to a website aggregating reviews of consumer products. My short essays on the latest volumes in Terry Pratchett's ‘Discworld’ (1983–2015) and Robert Jordan's ‘Wheel of Time’ (1990-ongoing) series had few readers, but I remember being encouraged by the reception of my 700-word review of Friskies Come 'N Get It dry cat food. Titled ‘Limping Towards the Food Dish’, the review centred around an image of my dog, Jenny – otherwise slowed down by two old injuries, including a BB-gunshot wound inflicted by a neighbour who resented her barking – running to beat…

IN 1986, Marcel Christian LaBeija began producing ‘Idle Sheets’ – a series of more than fifteen zines documenting the latest New York Ballroom news – becoming, in the process, the scene's first historian. LaBeija had discovered the ball world in the 1960s and watched it transform over the next two decades. During that time, Ballroom adopted more structured events that included ‘houses’ – which served as both teams and alternative families for its members – and different competition categories that resulted in long and robust nights. The scene also became more inclusive of different gender identities, evolving from its origins as a gathering for femqueens (transgender women) to include butchqueens (gay and bisexual men), butches (masculine lesbian women) and women (feminine, cisgender straight, bisexual and lesbian women). As an avid…

In 1977, Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan appeared on The Mike McManus Show. Conducted three years before his death, the interview is a particularly solemn one, which reveals a man coming to terms not only with his own mortality, but with the notion of afterlife in the digital age. ‘When you're on the telephone or on radio or on television, you don't have a physical body,’ McLuhan mused. ‘You're just an image on the air. You're a discarnate being.' It is eerie, then, nearly 45 years after his death, to read McLuhan's words in filmmaker and media theorist Tiffany Sia's exhibition ‘Technical Difficulties’ at Maxwell Graham in New York. Set in the gallery's unassuming front window, An Image on Air (all works 2024) consists of a small surtitle board – an…

‘Bloom into the sky I'll climb up a ladder after you,’ writes Chinese poet Xi Chuan in his emphatic poem ‘Bloom’ (2014). At Zalucky Contemporary in Toronto, Lan ‘Florence’ Yee's latest solo show, ‘Which Came First, the Home or the Stranger?’, likewise takes another's path as an invitation to follow. In Orchidelirium (all works 2024), an orange textile orchid, copied from a 13th-century Song Dynasty painting by Ma Lin, rises from a stack of folded sheets of canvas. Yee's creations are odes to add-ons, replicas, proxies, homonyms and copycats. When we meet at the gallery to discuss the show, Yee tells me that during the COVID-19 lockdowns they spent time browsing the Metropolitan Museum's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, and began to notice a pattern in the digital archive. Of…

English professors will tell you that Shakespeare is funny, but his jokes often elude my grasp: his complex verse can cloud the immediate comedy of his plays. A similar difficulty underscores Siji Krishnan's solo exhibition at Michael Kohn Gallery, aptly titled ‘Liminal Spaces’. Krishnan's luminous, sun-drenched palette and quick, sculptural brushwork belie the slapstick, sexy tableaux that hide in plain sight; in them, animals, prostitutes, parents and children coexist within dramatic natural oases. Drawing from traditions of landscape painting and Indian craft – her ‘canvases’ are often made from multiple layers of dried rice paper – Krishnan inflects pastoral environments with slyly raucous action, her compositions slipping between wit and refinement. Unpopulated views based on Krishnan's native Kerala cast a deceptive tranquillity over the gallery. The yellows, teals and beiges…

Amidst the hubbub and revelry that is Miami Art Basel, I unfortunately missed Sallisa Rosa's large-scale, ceramic installation Topography of Memory (2023) – her first US solo presentation – at the Collins Park Rotunda in Miami Beach this past December. I was fortunate enough, however, to be able to catch the Brazilian-born, Amsterdam-based artist's immersive and impressive installation this spring when it travelled to the Pinacoteca de São Paulo's newly built contemporary art building, Pina Contemporânea. Commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary and curated by Thiago de Paula Souza, the project is an ethereal landscape for viewers to explore and contemplate ideas of longing and collective memory. Housed in Galeria Praça – a small structure designed in 2004 by Paulo Orsini, which juts out of the Pina Contemporânea complex – Topography…

In her essay ‘Memory, Creation and Writing’ (1984), the American novelist Toni Morrison considers what it means to deliberately recall an episode from the past. This act, she writes, ‘is a form of willed creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was – that is research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way.’ Morrison's words might serve to describe the practice of the young British painter Hettie Inniss, who, in her debut solo exhibition at GRIMM, London, presents a suite of canvases depicting streets, landscapes and architectural interiors emptied of human life, each one painted from memory in a luxurious yet faintly sinister palette dominated by glowing ambers and golds. The more time…

Maz Murray's new film, Principal Boy (2024), presented alongside Thigh Rise (2023) and a range of sets and props at Focal Point, raises a series of intriguing questions. Firstly, how audiences used to seeing trans and non-binary people as minor characters in narratives created by cisgender people might engage with art made by and for trans and non-binary people. Secondly, what trans and non-binary artists might do to make our work more ‘accessible’ and, lastly, the extent to which we should. These two films appear in the main space, with a third, Laindon (2018), playing on a screen outside, alongside works by Amy Pennington and Gaby Sahhar. One significant difference between Thigh Rise, about a trans man who lives in a giant trans woman's boot, and Principal Boy, about a…

Bodies caught mid-choreographed movement, forms in absence, figuration emerging from an accumulation of slashed lines: these are the core motifs of Nick Mauss's debut solo show at Galerie Chantal Crousel, which explores the interaction between lightness and density through variegated actions of daubing, cutting and burning in ceramic, fabric and glass. The title of the show, ‘Close-Fitting Night’, recalls the artist's past presentations drawing on the works and lives of costume designers for Paris's famous Ballets Russes in the early 20th century, including Léon Bakst and Christian Bérard. Mauss has sought to reclaim both from historical obscurity over the last decade in a series of exhibitions, including ‘Portraits d'Intérieurs’ in 2014 at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. The influence of modernist ballet design can be found here, too, in…

‘When you show something, you take for granted that it can be seen,’ said Iman Issa during a talk at carlier | gebauer about her latest solo exhibition, which centres photography as a way of thinking about and approaching the world. Issa emphasizes that the recognition of an image is never guaranteed and that gaps exist between what is depicted and the act of bearing witness. The artist explores the very nature of visibility, asking how pictorial meaning is framed by time, language, place and audience. Issa's new series, ‘Doubles: Photograph – (Un)Like (M)Any Other(s)’ (all works 2024), is not comprised of photographs per se. Rather, it posits a relationship between museum-like labels and lacquered metal sculptures that speaks to what activates images. Take, for example, Scientist, in which a…

Rooted in German expressionist cinema, film noir is notable for its dramatic lighting, disorienting camera angles and entrenched sense of dread. The genre, which flourished in Hollywood during the 1940s and '50s, captured something of the existential crises of the postwar years. Atiéna R. Kilfa's film Rotor Vector (2024) – currently on view in her solo exhibition, ‘Special Effect’, at Den Frie – pays homage to the unease of the genre, starring a protagonist that could easily have stepped out of a sinister crime story. The grey-haired man dressed in a tuxedo and seated at a desk is the archetypal film noir gangster. As the camera zooms in, we find our attention drawn to details such as the folds of his shirt, the glasses resting on a newspaper, the deep…

I SWEAR I HAVE SEEN THE WOMAN in Matthias Groebel's painting Untitled (069) before. Her downcast eyes gaze from under hooded lids to a point beyond the compositional frame; the skin on her face is starkly illuminated by harsh flashlight from a camera held a little too close. The woman looks troubled and fatigued; some unspoken disaster hangs about her trembling lips. Something has happened, and she has decided to address it in public. The azure scarf she wears to cover her head marks her as a woman of faith, but Groebel otherwise depicts her in an unmarked room in a nameless place. Undoubtedly, however, the source image for this painting has come from a television screen: the oversaturated colours and the flickering whites of the walls produce a texture…

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There's an intimacy to the idea of an archive – collections of film, papers, ephemera and images amassed over time, consolidating memories into something corporeal. In their solo show at Cubitt, ‘I can fit a fist in my mouth’, Mathew Wayne Parkin explores close connections within their filmic archives, aligning footage of analogous moments that might be too intimate or too raw to be immortalized openly and individually. Among the show's sculptures (all works titled and dated I can fit a fist in my mouth, 2024) is a row of padlocks and key-rings suspended along a low wire between museum barriers. This image recalls the endless love locks that once adorned Paris's Pont des Arts bridge. Beyond this romantic interpretation, however, Parkin's collection also gestures towards BDSM practices, suggesting notions…

‘Love Is Real, and It's Inside of My Computer’ is an exhibition by the intersectionally disabled collective Babeworld and sound artist utopian_realism that focuses on the social and administrative relationships present in projects commissioned by creative institutions. The show questions the art world's capacity to support neurodivergent individuals and groups while also highlighting the mental burnout incurred by artists when navigating expectations. ‘Love Is Real …’ picks apart the possibility of self-care in the artists’ day-to-day lives, where games have become work, and an elusive fictional project is rapidly metamorphosing into new forms provoked by unrelenting administrative requests. Heavy black curtains line the interior of Grand Union, enhancing the sense that the exhibition is focused on internal world-building. Mounted in the middle of the cloaked wall, violet light spilling out…

As a dancer-turned-critic who grew up in the rarest of places – a British household uninterested in team sports – I've never had much appreciation for football. Not only did the sport seem a world away from my interests in the performing and visual arts, its negative associations with hooliganism and domestic violence compounded my disinclination to engage with it. Yet, in ‘WINNER’ (2024) – a new multi-channel film installation commissioned as part of the German government-supported art and culture programme of the UEFA EURO 2024 – Marianna Simnett employs dance and choreography to dissect the social and cultural nuances of football, bringing together two seemingly polarized disciplines and offering sport sceptics a way into ‘the beautiful game’. Shown across three screens in a long, narrow exhibition space at Berlin's…

Since her first appearance in 2011, Fatebe – the protagonist of the copious works of Ebecho Muslimova, an artist born in the Republic of Dagestan, educated in the US and now based in Mexico – has grown from a delicate, black and white ink figure displayed in A4 format to a character who fills two-metre-square, mixed-media canvases and stretches across whole walls of museums and galleries in larger-than-life murals. Cheerful, abject and crass, Fatebe is a counter-patriarchal version of Betty Boop, the oversexualized ‘baby vamp’ brought to life as an animated cartoon during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Sharing the bold, celebratory shapes of Niki de Saint Phalle's feminine figures, Fatebe engages in acts and scenes of sexual transgression that, if they have any precedent, are more likely to…

A knot-shaped trail of oil stains the grey concrete floor at the centre of 798CUBE. Formed from dripping grease, which lubricates the mechanisms of an enormous, hanging sculpture above, it is the shadowy footprint of Yunchul Kim's CHROMA IX (2024), a serpentine marvel of engineering that gently pulsates with an unnerving life of its own. The artist's largest ever solo exhibition, ‘Elliptical Dipole: Visceral Particles and Sorcerous Flows’, is arranged across two spacious floors and a landing area. It includes nine seemingly sentient sculptural installations, a collection of plan chests (Remnant Vitrine, 2024) and a series of seven, wall-mounted panels (‘Eluvial Horizon’, 2024). Multiple different materials – including aluminium, minerals and seaweed – seem to have negotiated an agreement to coexist, reacting to one another in an unfolding state of…

I'm often disappointed by the nature of performance art in the UAE, which is largely treated as window dressing for exhibitions rather than as a practice in its own right. However, ‘In Real Time’ at NYUAD Art Gallery – co-curated by executive director Maya Allison and recently appointed curator Duygu Demir – is a promising exception. Featuring 11 artists and collectives, as well as many more collaborators, the show presents artworks that evolve in performative ways throughout the course of the exhibition. A standout example is Gözde İlkin's mixed-media installation Entrusted Ground (2022–ongoing), in which suspended embroideries depict mythical, multi-limbed bodies. These chimeras of hybrid beings are mirrored in a performance, choreographed by Aslı Öztürk, in which three dancers move around the space enacting shamanic gestures, at times seeming directly…