Tabla de contenidos para Issue 249 - March 2025 en Frieze

Rahel Aima is a writer, editor and critic. Her work has been published in Artforum, Artnews, Art Review, The Atlantic, Bookforum, frieze, Mousse and Vogue Arabia, amongst others. → Profile: Wael Shawky, p. 80 Caitlin Chaisson is a curator and art critic. She is a curatorial assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, US. → Object Lessons: Mend and Repair, p.26 Jeremy Lybarger is a writer and art critic. He is currently working on Midnight Tremor, a book about the late artist Roger Brown. → Interview: With Gregg Bordowitz, p.48 Bilal Akkouche is a writer and assistant curator at Tate Modern, London, UK. → 1,500 Words: Father Tongue, p. 92 Brian Dillon is a writer and critic. His Essayism Trilogy was…

THOUGH STATIC IN NATURE, Maria Hupfield's sculptures are kinetic in spirit The mesh jerseys, boxing gloves and whistles that appear in her exhibitions give the impression of equipment used in high-intensity circuit training. Most sculpture used in performance art struggles to cast aside the designation of stage prop but, as Hupfield noted in the catalogue The One Who Keeps On Giving (2017): ‘I sometimes think the object is the excuse for the interaction.’ As both agents and tools, Hupfield's sculptures often rest between sets on display structures built from lumber beams and plywood, with high-visibility bands of tape and paint signalling attention and demarcating potential hazards in a space of active construction. Survival and Other Acts of Defiance (2012) is an installation that includes one of Hupfield's early performances for…

Lizards traverse a warm, sun-soaked torso: bodymaderock. A figure presses her flesh against a tree's ridged bark; another sprawls in a meadow, tall fingers of grass clinging to her bush. At one point, leaf litter fills the frame, the bare feet that tread upon it flitting in and out of shot. Made just a few years after experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer came out as gay, Dyketactics (1974) is a four-minute short in which nude women frolic and touch one another outdoors in Napa Valley. Characterized by layers, unorthodox camera angles and a haptic orientation – further developed in films like Place Mattes (1987), in which Hammer's superimposed extremities stroke landscapes – it asserts an expansive sense of pleasure. Dyketactics was among the first films about lesbian sex made by a…

Last year, I returned to Algiers for the first time in almost two decades. Instigated as a curatorial research trip, the visit ultimately evolved into a deeply personal journey. Having travelled there with my Algerian father, we stayed together at my grandfather's house and, over the course of two weeks, undertook a profound exploration of modern and contemporary art, personal identity and memory. One of our first visits was to the city's Musée National des Beaux-Arts. There, as I stood before Les Casbahs ne s'assiègent pas (The Casbahs Are Not Besieged, 1961-82) by Mohammed Khadda, one of Algeria's leading modernist painters, I recalled wandering the same labyrinthine passages that the artist depicts in his work as a site of resistance against French colonial occupation. (France annexed Algeria in 1834, with…

Since the renaissance, Western painters of landscapes have built compositions around a fixed point from which everything gains its coherence. In shan shui (mountain-water), a classical Chinese genre of landscape painting developed during the Six Dynasties period (220-589), the world is indeterminate, emergent, in flux. While the landscape painter seeks geometric order, as the philosopher Frarnçois Jullien writes in The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting (2009), the shan shui painter ‘grasps the world beyond its distinctive features and in its essential transition’. French American artist Vicky Colombet insists that her paintings aren't landscapes, calling to mind this distinction. In ‘Flying Back Home’, her small yet profound exhibition now on the second leg of a two-part rotation at FERNBERGER in Los Angeles, Colombet paints earth…

New Delhi-based artist Sohrab Hura's first US survey, ‘Mother’, showcases the many different mediums he employs, from the lens-based practice for which he is bestknown to more recent forays into drawing and painting. Sitting somewhere between testimony and confession, his perspective scrambles the autobiographical and the sociopolitical in unexpected and often revealing ways. The black and white photographs comprising the earliest work on display, Land of a Thousand Struggles (2005-06), document the daily hardships experienced by rural communities in central India, as well as their ongoing fight for dignity and justice. Hura pairs the images with handscrawled captions that situate them within a diaristic frame, offsetting the possibility of objectifying his subjects through the camera lens. Shot over numerous visits to Kashmir, Snow (2015-ongoing) deftly tackles the ongoing military occupation…

A vast, alluring textile installation in a rich gradient of warm hues – from crimson to burnt orange, canary yellow to soft pink – occupies the central wall of Elie Gallery in Dubai. At nine metres wide and three metres tall, Malian artist Abdoulayc Konaté's Source of Light: Arabian Pattern on Ochre Background (all works 2024) evokes a desert landscape at sunset whilst also paying homage to the proud tradition of West African textiles that uphold its beauty and abundance. Created from woven and dyed materials native to Konaté's homeland, the work was commissioned for ‘Sambadio’, the artist's first solo exhibition in the Middle Easl. Konaté's latest works are rife with symbolism. Celestial elements such as the moon, sun and stars appear on contrasting textile backgrounds; evening colours of indigo…

High-contrast swatches of red, black and white paint; meticulous grids of squares and circles; rhythmic resonances of symmetry and sequence: at first blush, Hur's detached, minimalist paintings, on view in her solo exhibition ‘8’ at DOOSAN Gallery in Seoul, appear formulaic, even derivative. Linger awhile and they become captivating, disorienting, visceral. What lends them their singular potency is the way in which they function as neither images nor objects, but portals that induce embodied modes of perception. Four of the eight paintings on view – all titled Threshold (2024) – comprise a network of stripped-back geometric abstractions; each contains a translucent white rectangle layered over a ground of cadmium red, punctuated by black dots evenly spaced across the canvas. A delicately rendered, edge-to-edge square grid reinforces the overtly rectilinear sensibility…

Lukas Thaler's first solo exhibition at Galerie Thoman, ‘ooze’, feels like a desert, rife with mirages. The experience of the artist's wall-mounted works – wood panels daubed with acrylic resin, marble sand and ink – resides in their uppermost layers. Interacting with light, the paintings’ surfaces become loci for optical illusions, inviting us to investigate their meticulously sculpted forms. His aim, the artist tells me, is to ‘create the feeling that the colour is not on the object but comes out of it’. Drawing in the viewer, this ‘oozing’ effect almost invites touch: the beautifully crafted and luminous facades repeatedly evoke vitality, movement and organicity, yet beneath their animate textures lurks a cool stillness. Take, for example, ‘Soluble Subjects’ (all works 2024), a series of paintings that greets the visitor…

When heated to 130.5°C, iodine crystals transform into a purple gas, which can be hazardous if ingested. Hamad Butt's sculptural installation Familiars Part 1: Substance Sublimation Unit (1994) contains such crystals, which undergo this swift change when they encounter a powerful electric element Here, they are vacuumed within cylindrical Borosilicate glass vials, which form the rungs of a ladder displayed horizontally against a wall behind a barrier. A quiet drama and spectre of danger permeates ‘Apprehensions’, the most comprehensive survey to date of Butt's work. Organized by the Irish Museum of Modern Art's exhibitions curator, Sean Kissane, with independent academic and curator Dominic Johnson, the show takes place across three floors of a white house set aside from the museum's central courtyard. Kissane and Johnson's ambition with the show is…

At the start of this year, the world watched huge swathes of Los Angeles burn to the ground. The climate future we've been warned about – rising temperatures, extended droughts – cut its violent path across roughly 72 square kilometres. Among more than 16,000 razed buildings were countless artists’ homes and studios, while museum and private collections were also imperilled or even destroyed. As we assembled this issue, I kept returning to the feature by assistant editor Cassie Packard, which focuses on groundbreaking queer artists who are reconsidering the ways we address the natural world – not by establishing woodland utopias, but by recognizing that a ‘radical intimacy’ with this damaged planet must incorporate the toxicity and pollutants we have brought upon it. ‘The view of nature as pure, untouched…

IN JANUARY 2024, museums across the US closed exhibitions, removed objects from view and covered up displays. Under significant revisions to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) – a federal law first introduced in the 1990s mandating the return of select Indigenous American funerary objects – institutions retrieved objects to figure out how to comply with a newly expedited five-year repatriation timeline. A few months earlier, in October 2023, the Smithsonian Institution and the German government had announced the return of some of the Benin Bronzes hundreds of sculptures, plaques and ornaments plundered by British soldiers in 1897 from Benin City, in what is now Nigeria. Most recently, in November 2024, 1,440 trafficked antiquities, valued at more than US$10.4 million, were returned to India through the Manhattan…

In the introduction to Hatred of Capitalism (2002) – a collection of Semiotext(e)'s foremost writings – editor Sylvère Lotringer remarked that, when he launched the press in 1974, Western society was ‘in the last gasp of Marxism’ – a final surge of radical thought amidst the waning tides of revolutionary fervour. This oral history delves into the press's past 30 years, focusing on its transformative journey through the early 2000s and its migration to Los Angeles, yet never losing sight of its roots as an experimental journal and imprint championing French theory and post-Marxist ideology. Through the voices of key figures, we explore how Semiotext(e) evolved from a provocative outpost for intellectual rebellion to a cornerstone of contemporary radical thought. – Terence Trouillot The press continues to be forged by…

Cinnamon, cloves, cocoa, tobacco: you'll smell Deley Morelos's works before you sec them. For more than three decades, the Colombian artist has scented the soil in her large-scale installations to engage with our relationship to the earth. The significance of this gesture is made explicit in ‘De Profundis’, her current exhibition at Centro Andaluz de Arte Contcmporáneo (CAAC) in Seville, a river city central to the development of international trade routes and colonies between the 15th and 17th centuries. Arranged across four rooms of the dcconsccrated monastery that now houses CAAC, the sole and titular installation, Profundis (2024), comprises locally harvested sediments – red soil from Huelva, clay and albero sand from north of the city – mixed with other natural materials, such as hay, jute, wood, latex, spices, seeds…

On an overcast winter day, in a park hedged by Frankfurt's business skyscrapers, Gustav Metzger's Strampelnde Bäume (Flailing Trees, 1999/2024) comprises a row of lifeless, upended trees, their tops encased in concrete slabs, roots pointing upwards like bare branches. Blending with the tepid corporate architecture and the shrinking enclave of greenery dotted with public sculpture, these zombified trees mark the entrance to the artist's first museum retrospective in Germany. An inconspicuous yet poignant monument to unhampered urban growth, Strampelnde Bäume also serves as a reminder that Metzger's practice was defined by being uprooted. Born in 1926 in Nuremberg to a Polish Orthodox Jewish family, most of whom soon perished in the Holocaust, the artist was evacuated to the UK in 1939 on a Kindertransport shortly before the outbreak of World…

AT THE START OF THIS YEAR, Los Angeles was burning and Donald Trump became the 47th President of the United States. This country stands on the precipice of something momcntous, likely disastrous. Teetering on the edge of fascism, its dreams of prosperity and equality seem to be turning to ash, much like the 12,000 buildings lost to the LA fires, underscored by the news that 1,000 of California's Frontline firefighters are incarcerated and woefully undercompensated under inmate servitude. It's hard to feel any optimism during this turbulent time. These grotesque injustices, the anger and fear that have taken root in the pit of my chest, all draw me to David Hammons's iconic work Injustice Case (1970). Part of his series ‘Body Prints’ (1968-79) - for which the artist would cover…

IN HIS OWN TELLING, American architect Michael Reynolds had the revelation in 1970 after watching Walter Cronkite on CBS Evening News. ‘They were talking about beer and soda cans being thrown all over the countryside,’ he notes in Journey: Part One (2008). ‘They predicted a garbage problem in the future.’ The same broadcast reported on the clearcutting of a forest in the Pacific Northwest for timber to meet housing demands. ‘What if we used what society discards,’ thought Reynolds, ‘to make the things we need?’ American popular discourse in the United States had primed Reynolds for this breakthrough. News stories throughout the 1960s exposed the nuclear fallout in the American Midwest from weapons-testing, the rivers and lakes filling with industrial pollutants and the major cities blanketed in thick, noxious smog.…

JEREMY LYBARGER What should people expect to see at The Brick? GREGG BORDOWITZ ‘This Is Not a Love Song’ is centred around the third instalment of a film trilogy that I started making in the early 1990s. The first two were Fast Trip, Long Drop [1993] and Habit [2001]. The last film, Before and After (Still in Progress) [2023], is a kind of anthology of performance works I made that directly relate to the two earlier films. Fast Trip, Long Drop was an experimental documentary about me – a Jewish, queer man living with HIV at the height of the AIDS epidemic – which also featured lots of fictional elements and employed many strategies found in poetry; it has a very collage aesthetic. It was almost a decade before I…

In one of the eeriest works at Jeddah's inaugural Islamic Arts Biennale in 2023, a trio of giant streetlights tilted slowly from side to side, sound tracked by the otherworldly hum of locusts. This kinetic sculpture was In the Sound of Muzdalifah (2023) by Egyptian artist Wael Shawky, known for his richly textured filmic trilogies that challenge the hagiographic construction of history. The work recalls the artist's vivid childhood experience of Hajj – the holy pilgrimage to Makkah – in which the faithful perform combined sunset and evening prayers before sleeping under the stars just outside Islam's holiest city. While intended to speak to the sense of wonder and spiritual calm the artist experienced during his pilgrimage, shown in Saudi Arabia amidst its most recent social reform, the work felt…

In 1692, an enslaved Caribbean woman named Ti tuba was accused of witchcraft and imprisoned for more than a year in Salem. Almost three centuries later, through a combination of historical documentation and imagination, Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé published I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1986). Condé's novel is a tale of yearning, as Ti tuba gradually loses the things she loves – from her parents to her homeland – and grasps at reconnection with the help of'invisibles': ancestors who accompany her throughout literal trials and tribulations. In Palais de Tokyo's latest group show, ‘Tituba, Who Protects Us?’, her story is echoed in the work of 11 contemporary artists, each of whom asks where and with whom refuge can be found in moments of vulnerability. Walking into a darkened gallery…