Tabla de contenidos para Issue 248 - January/February 2025 en Frieze

I FIRST CAME ACROSS P. STAFF'S work in 2019, when I was a gallery assistant at a London art fair. Commonwealth and Council was showing the artist's Weed Killer (2017) in the basement of the venue and, distracted from my task at hand, I would return to this salient film at every opportunity. Its script was based on Catherine Lord's memoir, The Summer of her Baldness (2004), which tracks the author's experience of chemotherapy. The film features a potent monologue by actor Debra Soshoux on the corporal devastation of the treatment, scenes shot on a thermal-imaging camera and artist Jamie Crewe doing a rousing lip-syncing performance in a gay bar. By casting two trans performers, Staff draws diffuse connections between the medical processes of transition and oncology and the power…

ON 16 FEBRUARY 1957, Frank O'Hara went to a party at Joan Mitchell's Manhattan apartment. Almost certainly, he went to many parties at Mitchell's that year, but it was this one, transpiring during the dreariest part of the year, that he chose to illuminate in a poem he did not publish until 1964. By the time ‘Poem Read at Joan Mitchell's’ appeared in a pamphlet-journal called Audit/Poetry, published out of Buffalo, Mitchell was living full time in France. The poem is sad, joyful, cacophonous and less ‘I do this, I do that’ - the epithet sometimes used to satirize O'Hara's verse - than echoing, maybe windy. It's a little hollow, if still as warm and soft as everything he composed. In the poem, O'Hara's poetry-self stand-in, ‘I’, is caught in…

It is more than half a century since Michael Craig-Martin premiered An Oak Tree (1973) at the Rowan Gallery in Mayfair - a short walk from the institution hosting this well-stocked retrospective of almost 150 works. An Oak Tree com prises a solitary glass of water perched on a shelf accompanied by a lengthy text, in faux-interview form, explaining how the artist has changed a glass of water into a full-grown oak tree ‘without altering the accidents of the glass of water’. It is a landmark work, though not quite canonical: unveiled a year later than, and an ocean away from, the bulk of the activity charted in Lucy Lippard's canonforming Six Years: 7he Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (1973), An Oak Tree‘s suggestion of transubstantiation…

‘First you put on your shirt, then your trousers; you drag yourself into bed at night and in the morning drag yourself out again; and always you put one foot in front of the other. There is little hope that will ever change. Millions have always done it like that and millions more will do so after us.’ This is how Georg Büchner observes the imposition of a cultural clockwork onto the natural phenomenon of the solar day in his play Danton's Death (1835). This ceremony of reality ritualistic, mimetic, performative is echoed by the 15th Baltic Triennial, ‘Same Day’, currently on view at the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius. Installed across the newly renovated CAC, ‘Same Day’, curated by Tom Engels and Maya Tounta, transports the viewer between varied…

Entering the Fotene Demoulas Gallery at the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, viewers encounter a quintet of towering soft sculptures by Tau Lewis, a Toronto-born, Brooklyn-based artist of Jamaican descent. With names ranging from The Night Woman to The Reaper (all works 2024), these larger-than-life beings are composed of natural and manmade materials - as varied as goatskin, coral, gold thread and steel - collected by the proudly self-taught artist. Akin to these materials, the figures are hybrid, drawing upon an array of mythological and historical sources. What are these entities’ stories, and why have they landed here? The last Transmission, a circular quilt in the room's centre, may hint at their cosmology: mundane objects including house keys, seashells and silver spoons are overlaid on long strips of fabric,…

Visitors to Débora Delmar's latest exhibition, ‘Liberty & Security’, should brace themselves for a rather hostile reception. When I went to Museo Jumex, the guard assigned to Delmar's show - located on a subterranean floor of the Mexico City institution - wasn't even sure when she might be able to open the gate for me. Standing three metres tall, GATE FOR MUSEO JUMEX (2024) - a heavy, black steel barrier of the kind typically used as a more secure alternative to garage doors in the global south - stretches the entire length of the gallery, partially obscuring the works beyond it. The guard is the keeper of KEYS (2024), which are held safely inside a small tin lockbox (SECURITY, 2024), but the exhibition's opening hours are never announced. I was…

Tao Hui's first institutional show in Hong Kong, ‘In the Land Beyond Living’, opens with a landscape of opposites. The first works that visitors encounter include a curtain of multicoloured, cast-glass chicken's feet hanging at the show's entrance. A delicacy in Chinese cuisine, chicken's feet are considered talismans of fortune given their association with the mythical phoenix, hence the installation's title: Money Grab Hand (2024). As indicated by Chilling Terror Sweeps the North (2024), a video housed in a striking temple-like structure nearby, chicken's feet are also used for divination. The female lead describes her grandmother cutting a live chicken's foot for a fortune teller to read before every new year, after her lover serves chicken's feet marinated the way his grandmother did. ‘That's so cruel,’ he says, sadly. ‘When…

Central to Emily Karaka's expressive practice is the Treaty of Waitangi, the founding document of Aotearoa New Zealand. Signed in 1840, the treaty was an agreement between the British Crown and more than 500 Māori chiefs. Its quasi-legal status, not to mention the differences between the English and Māori versions, would lead to the New Zealand Wars (1845-72), and the subsequent loss of ancestral land through confiscation and settler occupation. Karaka's large, semi-abstract, text-heavy paintings unspool the ongoing aftermath of this document to advocate for Māori stewardship of their own lands and to serve as a ledger of the slow and painful process of reparations. Remarkably, despite Karaka's renown as a senior Māori artist with a career spanning five decades, ‘Ka Awatea, A New Dawn’ is the first major survey…

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz's moving-image practice creates new worlds that offer opportunities for collective re-thinking - not just for the subjects of her work, but for those participating in its production. Whether speculative, as in her feature Oriana (2022), which resets Monique Wittig's canonical feminist novel Les Guérillères (1969) to Puerto Rico, or more recognizably concerned with the everyday, as in Marché Salomon (2015), shot in a bustling market in Port-au-Prince, hierarchies and roles are redrawn. Santiago Muñoz and I met to discuss political militancy and disobedience, theatre and cinema, and approaches to moving-image work. The conversation has been edited for clarity. - Andreas Petrossiants ANDREAS PETROSSIANTS You've said that your work is not so much about San Juan as it is about thinking with San Juan. You've also remarked that…

APPLIED To ANY ARTIST, the phrase ‘late years’ - as does ‘beginning’, ‘middle’, ‘early’, ‘mid-career’, ‘twilight’ or other temporal designation, usually linear (despite the general mess of a life and living) - invites a host of readings that both are and are not quite right. We look to the start for rhymes with the end. For instance, a tidy parenthesis: Joan Mitchell's father, the irascible and exacting Jimmie, took her, aged 11, to see the first major exhibition of Vincent van Gogh in the United States (recently travelled from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Art Institute of Chicago), and it marked her indelibly. Van Gogh, with his colour and movement and feverish love of life, became a kind of artist patron saint whose wheatfields and…

On 4 August 2011, London's Metropolitan Police shot and killed Mark Duggan, a Black man, in circumstances which were contested. Duggan's death, amid longstanding tensions between police and the Black community, catalyzed peaceful protests against police brutality. Following reports of clashes between the police and a teenage girl - set against youth alienation and acutely felt austerity measures - dissent morphed into civil unrest, with looting and rioting spreading across the country. In an immersive exhibition at Somerset House Studios, ‘A Riot in Three Acts’, Imran Perretta resident artist, composer and filmmaker - has designed a replica of Reeves Corner in Croydon, where one of the House of Reeves buildings, a century-old family-owned furniture store, was set alight on 8 August 2011. Today Reeves Corner is a derelict, vacant site…

The 17th Lyon Biennale kicked off at the end of September to great pomp. As guest curator Alexia Fabre announced to a crowd of journalists, this year's edition is informed by ideas of personal relations, altruism and welcoming the other - vague but not irrelevant topics given how close France came to electing the far-right National Rally Party in July of this year. Among the most memorable works in the Grandes Locos - a former train-repair depot which serves as the biennial's main site - is Gözde İlkin's The Majority of Accent (2018-24), a mixed-media work in which the artist's characteristic biomorphic figures are painted and embroidered onto the surface of a large textile print of a quarry. The work evokes the venue's industrial past via images of labour organizing,…

Part of the Curated by festival in Vienna, ‘Play It as It Lays’ toys with our desire for solace and escape from an increasingly uncertain world. Taking its title from Joan Diction's 1970 bestseller, which traces 31-year-old actress Maria Wyeth's descent into madness amid the existentialist ennui of the 1960s, the exhibition features a range of artists whose practices grapple with the ramifications of a hyper-capitalist society. Near the entrance, James Richards's installation, Found Objects and Self Diagnosis Kits (2018-ongoing), is laid out on the floor with surgical precision. There is an ornamental sensibility to this extensive collection of medical supplies and disinfectants: these are treasured objects which help combat the fear of a contaminated life and offer a modest, if illusory, semblance of control. As well as hinting at…

There's a type of pornography in which the camera operator is involved in the action, shooting as they engage in various sexual acts. The resulting video, presenting a participant's point of view, allows its viewer to imagine they - not some distant actor - are the one being penetrated or fellated. Louis Fratino achieves the same effect, albeit through different means, in his miniature painting Blowjob and Moon (2019), in which a man kneels on all fours, eyes fixed forward. Oral sex is about to be performed, but its recipient is just outside the frame is, in fact, the person standing in front of it, studying Fratino's neat brushwork. Most of the gallery's visitors don't seem to realize what's about to go down. The painting itself is a perfect example…

Swedish artist Ulla Wiggen is best known for her mid-1960s paintings of electronics and computers. These flat yet intricate works resemble blueprints, often depicting circuit boards dotted with transistors, capacitors and electrical pathways. The recent surge of interest in Wiggen's early work is due to its foresight as much as its visual appeal. Her paintings prefigure today's digital world and highlight how we interact with our devices only at an interface level. The exact function of each piece of hardware is even more opaque today, decipherable only to the most technically proficient. ‘Passage’, Wiggen's extensive retrospective at the Espoo Museum of Modern Art (EMMA), features 45 works from the past 60 years. After a long hiatus from art, during which she worked as a psychotherapist, Wiggen recently resumed her practice,…

The Kosovo War is considered to have ended in June 1999, after the Kumanovo Agreement was signed by the International Security Force and the governments of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Republic of Serbia. Yet, today, the region remains disputed: Kosovo is still not a member of the UN, many member countries don't recognize its sovereignty and, as recently as 2022, Serbia considered deploying 1,000 troops to its southern neighbour. The notion that history can be easily grafted onto a timeline is complicated by Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj's exhibition ‘Abetare (Noisy Classroom)’ at kurimanzutto, New York, in which he conveys the complex, enduring realities of violence, displacement and trauma through local materials and voices. ‘Abetare’ sees Halilaj continuing his eponymous series (2015-ongoing) of classroom tables and large-scale bronze…

In the 1984 cult classic Ghostbusters, when the god Gozer asks the protagonists what form they'd like the destroyer of the world to take, one of the team envisages Stay Puft Marshmallow Man - the seemingly harmless mascot of an ultraprocessed snack food - who wreaks havoc on New York before finally being rest-rained. At more than nine metres tall and six metres wide, multidisciplinary artist Divya Mehra's inflatable replica, We're Ready to Believe in You (2024), almost entirely fills the second room of her solo show, ‘The End of You’, at Night Gallery. Though Stay Puft appears facedown mid-fall, his enormity commands the space and threatens to force everything else out of the way. Similarly to Mehra's other inflatables - which have ranged from a Taj Mahal replica (Afterlife…

It doesn't take long to realize that this year's Busan Biennale, ‘Seeing in the Dark’, is fiercely, if not at times anxiously, political. Upon entering the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan - one of four venues that houses the biennial - I was transported back to Documenta 15 in 2022, with works by the Indonesian ‘artivist’ group Taring Padi and the Palestine- and Belgium-based cohort Subversive Film dominating the ground floor gallery. Both collectives participated in that year's Documenta in Kassel, where they faced accusations of antisemitism - and, in Taring Padi's case, saw a work removed amid public outcry against the contentious exhibition. Two years later, with Israel waging a brutal war against Gaza - and now its neighbours - following the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023, the…

IN 2018, artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset installed an ATM into an extant section of the Berlin Wall. Titled Statue of Liberty, the sculpture, now permanently installed in the Hamburger Bahnhof, is a monument to the failed promises of German reunification. ‘Most people from the German Democratic Republic had high hopes for a better standard of living after unification; the artists said in a 2019 interview with Artnet, ‘but instead many were just left with no job and no dignity.’ I've been thinking about Statue of Liberty ever since mid-September, when the Berlin Senate announced it will cut cultural funding by an estimated 110 to 150 million euros next year. So far, the pleas of the Berlin Museums Association - who wrote in an open letter published on their website…

HANDS EVERYWHERE: hands sprouting out of torsos, hands grabbing heads, fingers pushing through soft flesh. There are bloody spatters and sores ketchup-red - and sauce bottles, too, and sausages, and fantastical beasts that resemble cutesified pig-rats. We're in a kitchen, then we're in the woods, then leaves and logs cover the kitchen counter. These deranged scenes are imagined by a machine, though one that has observed and remembered millions of images made by humans. The upsetting grey zone between the human and the non-human, between inanimacy and liveness, is, for Paul McCarthy, an inexhaustibly fertile terrain. In 1982, he made a rudimentary robot - Human Object - with a penis, a vagina, an anus and a head with a gaping mouth. Gallery visitors were encouraged to interact with it in…

SANJA GROZDANIĆ AND BASSEM SAAD'S performance Permanent Trespass (Beirut of the Balkans & The American Century) (2021-ongoing) begins with imminent liquidation. ‘Everything must go!’, Saad utters to Grozdanić. She is holding a copy of the script, but she's not reading it. Her delivery is unaffected; like the sparsely decorated interior that surrounds them, it's a bit empty. Some chairs and tables are arranged in quadrants, a few draped in white cloth; flowers with long stems lean in scattered vases. The two artists are playing travelling eulogists, who re-encounter one another at an estate sale somewhere on the ‘old continent’. They've been hired to mourn the death of something that lacks a proper name; jetlagged, they've arrived onto the funereal ground of this collapsing epoch. Across six acts, and the projection…

1 DON'T KNOW WHETHER to describe Joan Mitchell's painting Wood, Wind, No Tuba (1979) as a place or a time, a spatial or a sonic event, and maybe that's what makes it so great. Maybe that's what all painting is: a glorious no-place, or an elsewhere, or, in Mitchell's case, both things at once. After all, this might be one giant painting, or it might be a painting of two parts or times set next to each other in a perceptual parallax view. The two parts hit you as one immense and luxuriant curtain of colour that crashes over you, like a tidal wave, like a rapture. But it's impossible not to notice that the two sides are not merely a continuation of the same big wave, as if Mitchell…

The central character in the hour-long video Tres Lunas más Abajo (Three Moons Below, all works 2024) is on a mission to reconnect with her entangled particle: a concept from quantum physics whereby two linked particles can share states and communicate, even when separated by vast distances. After meeting her animal guide - a Harris's hawk native to South America - a cyborg version of the bird perches on her shoulder as she journeys towards her entangled counterpart. On the way, she uncovers a petroglyph hidden in the sand, meets a pair of entangled Pleiadians from Andromeda, who hand her a broom with which to cleanse herself before she can re-entangle, and heads to the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), where she dons a hard hat and visits the…

A replica of a shop front displays a series of mannequins dressed in sports attire, posed as if playing golf or in the middle of a game of tennis (Sports Shop, all works 2024). The canopied entrance to this faux store, nestled between the two window displays, looks like the perfect shelter for two lovers caught in a rainstorm. Here, in this seemingly innocuous space, everything might change and tension, sexual or otherwise, might bubble to the surface. Sports Shop - part of artist Lucy McKenzie's ongoing collaboration with designer Beca Lipscombe, Atelier E.B - reminds me of how desire and yearning can become entwined with public architecture and how such spaces can be incorporated into the narratives of our own relationships. Also on view in ‘Super Palace’ McKenzie's first…

Emanating from a small monitor at the centre of the gallery, the voices of Goshute Chairman Rupert Steele and Ely Shoshone elder Delaine Spilsbury form the conceptual backbone of Oscar Tuazon's first solo exhibition in Austria, ‘Words for Water’. The conservationists speak about the massacres of their ancestors, their fight against the Southern Nevada Water Authority's plans to pump groundwater from their native land, learning from ‘mother nature’ as our ‘original teacher’, and decentring human exceptionalism in favour of interconnectedness and respect. Their narrative sets the tone for a show whose engagement with water is inseparable from a deep sensibility towards Indigenous history and its relationship to nature. The video is part of Cedar Spring Water School (2023), one of three architectural structures in the exhibition that function as stages…

In his 2023 book Affinities, Brian Dillon, seeking to fathom his frequent use of the titular word in relation to artworks, defines it as the way ‘images and ideas sidled up to each other, seemed to seduce one another, in ways I could not (or did not want to) explain’. At Leonor Antunes's Lisbon homecoming, ‘the constant inequality of leonor's days’, the artist generously offers viewers an insight into her own affinities. Yet, with minimal interpretation provided across the two floors of the Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian (CAM), Antunes likewise seems to feel no need to furnish an explanation. The exhibition title references a 1972 ink-on-paper work by artist and poet Ana Hatherly, discovered by Antunes in CAM's collection, in which Hatherly repeatedly rewrites a line from a work…

In the mid-1960s, Chilean-born artist Cecilia Vicuña began combining salvaged materials into delicate bricolages she called ‘Precarios’, some of which she ceded to the tides. ‘The history of art written in the North includes nothing of the South,’ she mused in her 1983 book Precario/Precarious. Formerly positioned at that canon's margins, Vicuña's poetic reckoning with the precarity of ecosystems and communities in the face of colonialism and extractivism informed the third edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art (TBA), which devotes an entire wall to these sculptures. Curated by Dominique Fontaine and Miguel A. López, ‘Precarious Joys’ assembles work by 36 exhibiting artists and collectives, many of whom are Indigenous, diasporic and/ or citizens of the Global South. Spanning 11 venues - including, in acknowledgement of biennial tourism, an airport…

The first thing you will see upon entering Tina Girouard's retrospective at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) is a loop of floral fabric that hangs down from the second floor. Drawn from a set of 1940s textiles that Girouard received from her mother-in-law, who in turn received them from a relative named Solomon Matlock, the ‘Solomon's Lot’ fabrics recur from the 1970s onwards in various installations and performances across 50 years of the artist's collaborative practice. Girouard's loop recalls a contemporaneous work by conceptual artist Daniel Buren: Painting-Sculpture, travail in situ (1971) - a large sheet of striped fabric installed in the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Ultimately removed because it blocked views of other exhibited works, Buren's piece ignited a now-canonical discussion over…

Nobody goes to an exhibition of ecological art expecting to take home an escape plan for humankind's impending extinction. Nor does ‘Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism’ - curated by The Brick's deputy director, Catherine Taft, in the non profit's new space - claim to provide any such solutions. What the exhibition does offer arc ‘ways of being’, as Taft writes in the wall text, that decentre not only a male perspective but also a human one, while taking up ecofeminism's central argument that environmental catastrophe is incepted by the Western capitalist patriarchy. The 18 artists and collectives in ‘Life on Earth’ - hailing from as far afield as Belgium, French Guiana, Lithuania and South Korea - are less concerned with assigning blame than they are with establishing new models…