Tabla de contenidos para Issue 244 - June/July/August 2024 en Frieze

Carson Chan is director of the Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and Natural Environment, and a curator in the Department of Architecture and Design, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA. → Built Environment: Sleepers Awake, p. 29 Derin Fadina is an architect, critic and associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins, London, UK. → Built Environment: The Promise of the Past, p. 33 Laura McLean-Ferris is a writer and curator. Her work has appeared in publications including 4Columns, Artforum, ArtReview, Flash Art and Mousse. → Built Environment: Tell It Slant, p. 23 Paul Chan is an artist. His solo exhibition ‘Breathers’ is on view at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Missouri, USA, until 11 August. → 1,500 Words: The Second Self, p. 92 Lubaina…

AT FIRST GLANCE, Japanese artist Minoru Nomata’s paintings look like photographs, so realistic are his portrayals of concrete and steel structures. The backgrounds betray them first: unnaturally dramatic clouds covering densely coloured skies that complement their imposing architectural foregrounds a little too perfectly. Strangely timeless and yet clearly modernist, Nomata’s uncanny buildings are not the utopian fantasies of Italian futurist Antonio Sant’Elia or Russian constructivist Vladimir Tatlin. While they are reminiscent of the international style, they are not typical of it: they would not have integrated readily within the architecture of the Soviet bloc, nor of North America at the height of the World’s Fairs, nor of Oscar Niemeyer’s Brazil. Nor do they quite evoke Nomata’s homeland, although the Japanese have a specific name – haikyo – for the type…

The best-named periodical of the 20th century was Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. It was founded in 1962 by Ed Sanders – poet, activist and member of the rock band The Fugs – and ran for 13 issues until 1965. Fuck You came on the heels of Yeah (1961–65), another anti-establishment zine, started the previous year by Sanders’s fellow Fug, writer Tuli Kupferberg. Sanders’s title and subtitle encapsulate a mind-body problem that has often troubled the more recondite corners of small-press publishing culture. On the one side is the Fuck You part, as in: you’re not cool enough, not smart enough, not sat comfortably enough on the right side of history to get what we’re talking about. On the other side is the Magazine of the Arts part:…

In 1962, a new Jamaican consciousness and sense of self was reborn in fire through ceremonial state independence from Britain, its former enslaver and colonist. Not since the initiation of the Universal Negro Improvement Association – founded in 1914 by the internationalist political leaders Marcus Garvey and his first wife, Amy Ashwood Garvey – did the country’s Black majority overwhelmingly acknowledge themselves as the sons and daughters of the African diaspora and active participants in the global Black struggle for liberation, in tandem with the political selfhood they wished to attain. Central to these efforts were self-imaging and esteem-raising cultural work. As Jamaica-born historian Colin A. Palmer states in Inward Yearnings: Jamaica’s Journey to Nationhood (2016): ‘The timing of Jamaica’s birth, for good or ill, was essentially an accident of…

In the spring of 2017, while Venezuela was engulfed in a wave of civil unrest against President Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorial regime – protests which were brutally repressed by the state security apparatus – the artist Alexander Apóstol was surreptitiously producing ‘Regime: Dramatis Personae’ (2017–18) in a studio in Caracas. This wondrous photographic series, created in collaboration with members of the trans community, is one of the highlights of ‘Posture and Geometry in the Era of Tropical Autocracy’, Apóstol’s mid-career survey, curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. The portraits are a mordant encyclopedia of archetypal characters – the disappeared opponent, the ideological tourist, the beauty queen, the threatened journalist, the caudillo – that cannily captures the metamorphosis of Venezuelan society over two decades of…

Zeinab Saleh’s pictures request a patient gaze, disclosing their secrets over time. Across seven canvases and a handful of works on paper, her stripped-down palette of mainly ice blue and peach tones describes misty impressions of domestic interiors; spaces filled with evocations of the physical states of water, from the shimmer of hoar frost to the hardness of ice and the translucence of condensation on glass. In Water has memory (all works 2024), dried watermarks, produced by laying crumpled cloth on wet ground, score the sheets of an unmade bed. Early morning transports us to a kitchen bathed in dawn twilight; in If not now, then when, oversized silhouettes of fuchsia flowers dangle in a hallway whose open door and patterned carpets connote comfort and familiarity. Presence is subtle and…

In the mid 1980s, the French filmmaker Chris Marker attempted to build a chatbot called Dialector. Anticipating the age of generative AI, the programme was given a typical Markerian twist: in response to your queries, Dialector spat out random images – cats, owls – and text. In an essay evaluating the project for this issue of frieze, Paul Chan writes that Marker’s love of the dialogic nature of art and inquiry meant he ‘didn’t pursue life; he pursued lives.’ In doing so, he created an ‘array of selves’ that could serve as a model for the artist-as-community, rather than standalone genius. Today, community has become fashionable gabble in contemporary art. This issue asks how – and where – it is lived. Our columns circle around the built environments that shape…

IN JOANA CHOUMALI’s mixed-media work As the Wind Whispers (2019), dawn light engulfs the modernist towers of Abidjan’s Cité Administrative. Here, the artist stitches an intricate figure-ground composition: a scene of everyday life – companions relaxing in the shade of trees – against the backdrop of the city’s seemingly indestructible buildings made from the 1960s through to the ’80s. Structures including Hotel Ivoire (1963) and La Pyramide (1973) cemented the national aspirations of postcolonial Côte d’Ivoire: unity, independence and modernization. Long after the ‘miracle state’ of the country’s first president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, these buildings continue to echo an unfulfilled promise of unbuilding the (neo)colonial relations between periphery and core. Following recessions, political instability and World Bank-mandated aggressive neo-liberalization, the cranes are once again turning in Abidjan, where the tallest governmental…

I FIRST MET TENKO NAKAJIMA GLENEWINKEL shortly after Japan lifted its COVID-19 restrictions and reopened for international visitors in November 2022. On my last night in town, she invited me to Tomhei Diner – a restaurant in the gallery Lavender Opener Chair. We were joined by the artist Marysia Paruzel, who had just opened her show ‘Human Bites’ in an unfinished construction site in the city centre, the first edition of Tenko’s new, eponymous roving project space. My early flight the next day meant I couldn’t see the show in person, but the install shots testified to the gallery’s aim to blur the distinctions between artwork, gallery and city; the photos are an impressionistic record rather than clinical documentation. An umbrella with balloons tied to its handle was installed on…

LUBAINA HIMID How are you feeling in the run-up to your show, ‘Ah, Sugar’, at Cubitt, London? MARLENE SMITH I am equal parts excited and terrified! The two emotions keep propelling me through the process of making. LH I think that terror never truly goes away, no matter how small or large the project. I get frightened that the work is actually rubbish, that I’ve lost the ability to tell what to leave out and what to keep in. What are you working on at the moment in relation to ‘Ah, Sugar’? MS For a while, I’ve been trying to make work with fondant icing that is as delicate as possible without breaking. I want to imprint it with some crochet pieces that belonged to my mum. It occurred to…

Oliver Lee Jackson would probably tell you that there is no need for reviews of his exhibitions. No need, in fact, for words at all. He might well argue that his paintings, which live primarily in a zone of non-objective abstraction, but which often approach – and sometimes even entirely breach – its borders, exist outside of language. As Jackson said in a 2018 video interview with the National Gallery of Art in Washington: ‘There is no storyline to follow.’ Maybe he underestimates the persistence of narrative as a route into meaning-making. Jackson’s story begins in 1935 in St. Louis. In the 1960s, he became involved with community cultural projects as well as with the Black Artists Group, a crossdisciplinary collective of musicians, actors, dancers, poets and artists. He later…

Nicole Wermers’s Reclining Female #6 (2024) looks out over Glasgow. The sculpture’s upper portion, a nude female, rests on one elbow as she admires the view from her vantage point atop a wooden board balanced firmly on the work’s lower half: an abundantly stocked housekeeping trolley. The Capella Building, where she sits, is a plate-glass office development in the city’s business district. The large, seventh-floor gallery space had remained unoccupied from the building’s completion in 2008 until it was taken over temporarily last year by The Common Guild. Despite her corporate surroundings, however, Wermers’s figure is most definitely not at work. Four similar sculptures are dotted around the room. In public spaces, trolleys like this are so ubiquitous that they all but disappear. Here, there is something beautiful about them.…

LET’S GET THE OBVIOUS OUT OF THE WAY first: Jana Euler’s GWF 1 (2019) is a painting of a huge dick. The Tate website calls ‘Great White Fear’ (2019), the nine-canvas series of which this work is part, ‘phallic-like’, but that’s far too polite. Depicting muscular sharks jumping out of water amid splashes of sea spray, these paintings are about as understated in their phallicism as the veiny, ejaculating penises horny teenagers like to draw on each other’s schoolbooks. Anyone who has seen Euler’s sharks in person – as I did when they premiered during Gallery Weekend Berlin in 2019 – is well aware of what they represent. What audiences might not know, however, is the staggering statistic that inspired their production: of the 33 solo shows presented by galleries…

IN 1987, COMPOSER JOHN CAGE wrote a four-page piece for organ called ORGAN2/ASLSP, an adaptation of Aslsp, As SLow aS Possible (1985), which he wrote for piano. Each note decays as soon as it’s been played on the piano but, on the organ, the note can be maintained for as long as the performer wishes or deems ‘possible’. Cage didn’t write a time signature, nor does his score adhere to conventional values. Thick horizontal bars follow each note, the length of which equate to a percentage of the pre-determined duration of the entire performance. Over the years, organists have competed to make their performance the longest: slow is always relative. In 2009, Diane Luchese gave a performance that lasted just under 15 hours; Christopher Anderson played for 16 hours in…

WHEN TAKAYUKI KUBOTA, the artist who runs the alternative space Fig., tells me that he’s seeking to build an exhibition making practice that stops short of professionalism, I check myself. He’s speaking to me on Zoom after a long day of work and the words are delivered a bit awkwardly, but my confusion also has to do with the nature of the Japanese language, which tends to unfold over a series of deferrals that invite an anxious listener to leap to conclusions before the speaker has completed their statement. Since I know Kubota studied at Hunter College in New York before returning to Japan in 2016, the word ‘professionalism’ triggers associations with the old trope of the artist who comes back from overseas with a mission to preach the international…

DESPITE BILLING ITSELF AS A ‘PLAYGROUND’, The 5th Floor is, in fact, one of Tokyo’s most astutely programmed notfor-profit exhibition spaces. Spanning three humble rooms atop a former company dormitory, The 5th Floor is located in Nezu, an old residential neighbourhood dotted with small shops that make it a popular place to take a stroll. Current director and curator Tomoya Iwata, who has helmed the space since 2022, aims to enable curatorial projects that would be difficult to realize elsewhere and to provide an arena in which young curators can hone their skills. As a result, an experimental yet lyrical programme, organized by both in-house and guest curators, has flourished. The 5th Floor is not an anti-institutional space, Iwata explained to me, when I visited one day in early spring;…

The Swedish expression att kasta sig, meaning ‘to throw oneself into something’, is a fitting choice of title for one of the six drawings currently on display in Fatima Moallim’s solo exhibition at [tart vienna], the project space of Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman. The self-taught, Moscow-born, Paris- and Stockholm-based artist works quickly, without making preliminary sketches. The largest piece on show, Untitled (all works 2024) – in which black and blue lines meander across a 2 x 2.5-metre linoleum support – is one of several the artist made directly in the exhibition space during preparations for the show. This sense of urgency is present throughout. In Frånvarande närvaro (Absent Attendance), for instance, the artist has pressed down so hard while drawing circles with a red pen that it has…

In the arena-like central atrium of the Yokohama Museum of Art, the main venue of the 8th Yokohama Triennale, artistic directors Carol Yinghua Lu and Liu Ding offer an unusual provocation with ‘The Directory of Life’. On a table, the Beijingbased curators have arranged an array of e-readers loaded with texts by contemporary thinkers – from Judith Butler and Kojin Karatani to Wang Hui and artist duo Erik Niedling and Ingo Niermann – inviting you to get lost in thought amidst the riot of art. Pippa Garner’s Human Prototype (2020), a chimeric figure made from fused male and female mannequins, abuts the table, while Sandra Mujinga’s ghostly mobiles of crimson fabric draped over gargantuan, skeletal armatures (And My Body Carried All of You, 2024) loom directly overhead. From one side…

In Poetics of Relation (1990), Édouard Glissant writes that ‘relation struggles and states itself in opacity’. To lay the groundwork for an ethical way of relating across difference, we must first accept the opacity – the fundamental right to remain unknowable – of the other. This interplay is at work in ‘Scratching at the Moon’ at the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, a group exhibition curated by Anna Sew Hoy and Anne Ellegood that brings together 13 contemporary Asian American artists with ties to the city. Spanning sculpture, photography, video, multimedia installation and performance, the exhibition moves beyond limiting categorizations of diverse identities and experiences, instead centring relationships and community as cornerstones of what it might mean to be Asian American. It presents a coming together of identities that…

Entering Marc Hundley’s latest solo show, ‘Once there was a tree’, viewers find themselves in a version of the artist’s studio. In the middle of the room is a large table, beneath which sits several tubs of paint alongside a rolled-up canvas, glue and other functional detritus. The tabletop itself is empty – a slab on which to dissect and reconstruct ideas, perhaps. Like a pop-cultural jigsaw puzzle that pieces together to construct an idea of self, Hundley’s practice extracts and re-presents images produced by or about other artists, inviting viewers to examine his position. These reworkings subtly gesture towards a need for discovery, pointing to humans’ extractive relationship with nature and destructive longing for a more self-serving world. Pinned to the back wall of the studio space is a…

What does it mean to be alone? In Dean Sameshima’s recent body of work – 25 monochrome photographs of queer men in Berlin porn theatres with sumptuous black negative spaces and blinding white cinema screens – ‘alone’ is a complicated term. Each intimately scaled work in the series ‘being alone’ (2022) invites the viewer to step closer and peer into the rooms photographed, offering only small clues about the spaces and people they are observing. Velvety matte black occupies large swathes of these pictures. Sometimes, light serves as an interior detail, illuminating drab rooms with fissured tiles, messy plaster repairs, ventilation pipes snaking across the ceiling and rows of seats bolted to the floor. Sameshima redirects the viewer’s attention from the on-screen pornography – the most urgently visible thing as…