Table of contents for Issue 250 - April 2025 in Frieze

A FORMATIVE MOMENT in my film making practice came when I attended a talk in my early 20s by the writer and activist Selma James. I'm paraphrasing here, but she mentioned that her former husband, C.L.R. James, had described his book The Black Jacobins (1938) as a mass audience text. He felt that the theory, philosophy and prose we often think of as elite or scholarly can be accessible to anyone; it's how you hand them to people. I'm of Caribbean heritage and was raised by artists in an apartment full of books. Literature, for me, is foundational. Writers like Suzanne Césaire, Édouard Glissant and Derek Walcott have been as influential to me as the romantics were to the surrealists. I first read Césaire's writing in Refusal of the Shadow…

OVER THE LAST FEW YEARS, I have opened each of my solo film programmes with a brief request: that the audience attends to what they cannot see, to consider why visibility may be overvalued. I'm attempting to distinguish between the acts of seeing and of witnessing, while encouraging viewers to read the images with a critical paranoia, assuming something is always missing. When it comes to Iranian post-revolution cinema, there is no shortage of missing subjects or bodies erased by the censors. Despite this, traces of them can be found in every single frame. For my younger self, watching these films always involved a form of double vision. I would sec what was shown, but also what wasn't - or, rather, what I knew I wasn't allowed to see. You…

LEONARDO BIGAZZI Over the past 15 years, as the notion of spectatorship has evolved in tandem with how we experience moving images - from vast screens in public settings to tiny devices held in the palms of our hands - crossovers between virtual video platforms, art institutions and cinema auditoriums have increased significantly. Artists born in and since the 1980s have been the ones to really capitalize on this shift, not only by navigating the opportunities that lie between the art world and the film industry, but by responding conceptually in their practices. For example, Ana's É Noite na América [It Is Night in America, 2022], commissioned and produced by the Fondazione in Between Art and Film, exists in two forms: a feature film that was presented in competition at…

Bruno Zhu's solo exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery presents the viewer, initially, with two bright green doors. Each leads to a different room in a quadrant of spaces fashioned from plasterboard. Enter the left door and you're in an empty space with a purple floor and walls coloured red, green, yellow and blue. Travel clockwise and you're in a room bare except for a set of large, mirrored vitrines with apertures shaped like card suits. Pass through a door in this room and you're met with nothing but a large bow on the wall. Finally, you encounter a room clad in kitsch Victorian decor. But something in this room is wrong: the ceiling mouldings are on a wall; wallpaper is on the floor; the room is lying sideways, it seems. Two…

In a contemporary culture undergirded by maximalism, the powerful symbolism of a modest object can easily be underestimated. Yet, even a simple depiction of a flute or a facial outline can hold multiple meanings. Celebrating the revolutionary potential of absence, Peruvian artist Claudia Martínez Garay's 'Borrowed Air' interweaves etching, printmaking and painting - mediums that, within contemporary art, have tended to be saturated by the European canon - to introduce striking portrayals of Andean history that ask who gets to shape collective narratives and why. Presented in the heart of the gallery, Intrusos en sus tierras (Intruder on Their Lands, 2024) features a series of vivid risographs hung together in a tight, rhombus formation. Inspired by images from state-sanctioned schoolbooks, Martínez Garay's risographs skilfully subvert national propaganda, undermining the authority…

Recent months have seen extreme weather act like punctuation: first came September's Hurricane Helene in the Southeastern US; then, in January, the Los Angeles fires, which continue to burn in the mountains above me as I write. In late November, I happened to see Bethany Collins's Seattle Art Museum exhibition, 'At Sea', during a bomb cyclone in Seattle that killed two people. The weather was a sadly apt backdrop: much of the work on view re-examines canonical literature that contends with loss - of hometowns and wilderness, of lovers and countries. Collins appropriates and transforms older texts to reflect each vivid description of disaster, resulting in degraded, half-destroyed artworks that feel almost post-apocalyptic. 'Then he bewail'd / His native isle, with pensive steps and slow/ Pacing the border of the…

Since the first Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) was held in 1993, its organizers have continuously pushed back against Eurocentric tropes that pervade exhibition-making in Australia by putting the continent's cultural output in conversation with that of its neighbours in Asia and the Pacific. The eleventh edition of APT, on view at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), showcases over 500 artworks by more than 200 artists from some 30 countries. Per the wall text, the curatorial premise is 'concepts of crisis, community and care'. However, as with any exhibition of this scope, this brief thesis does not fully convey the expansive nature of the show. In addition to the in-house curatorium at QAGOMA, APT11 includes a number of projects developed with external curators, which are…

ONE DAY THIS PAST FEBRUARY, I cycled through the mist to see Donald Rodney's powerful retrospective, 'Visceral Canker', at Whitechapel Gallery in London. The titular 'canker' is two-fold: physical ailments and the lingering, persistent sickness of a racist Britain. Rodney, a founding member of the BLK Art Group, died in 1998, aged just 38, from sickle cell anaemia - a blood disorder mostly affecting people of African and Caribbean descent I spent a long time looking at Rodney's sketchbooks in archive vitrines. There, my eye lingered on a page where he had rewritten a passage from Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859): 'It was the season of light/ it was the season of darkness / it was the spring of hope/ it was the winter of dispair [sic]'.…

THIS SUMMER, I'll make my first foray into narrative feature filmmaking. The film, Lowndes County, will be shot in Columbus, Mississippi - the county where my parents grew up. The film is about my dad and two of his brothers who drove school buses when they were just 14, 15 and 16 years old in the segregated South. Talaya Delaney and I co-wrote the script 20 years ago. Initially, we worked on it for three or four years, trying to get grants. While the whole film industry is still racist, back then it was really racist: they weren't looking at any Black stuff, let alone period pieces. We're hoping to work with some of the crew from Ra Mell Ross's Nickel Boys (2024), like production designer Nora Mend is. I'm…

MARKO GLUHAICH How did your collaboration begin? JAMES RICHARDS Our work together grew organically out of our separate practices. In 2018-19, I curated a series of exhibitions - at Cabinet in London, Chapter in Cardiff and Delmes & Zander in Cologne - for which Tolia made installations to display her own drawings or works by other artists. It was so fun exploring the cities together and gathering found objects for her work that, somehow, I kept getting more and more pulled into its production. Often, I would spend the days with the install teams hanging the other parts of the show, and the evenings with Tolia, covering her work with graffiti and coffee stains. Until, at some point, it was like: 'Oh, we're making work together now!' TOL IAASTAKHISHVILI Yeah,…

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The earliest work in this six-decade survey of Joan Snyder's art, Grandma Cohen's Funeral Painting (1964), is an ambiguous picture. A body is laid out for visitation, limbs outlined in black and ochre, interlaced with a pillowy white shroud. Or so it seems until the scale shifts and the agitated stripes in the chest area transform into a gathering of mourners on snowy ground. Another option: this is a figure and a landscape, but also a composition of abstract marks. In the late 1960s, Snyder initiated her 'Stroke' series, celebrating the vital gesture of painting. Initially, she located her brushstrokes within landscapes. In Stroke Landscape (1968), the canvas is divided horizontally: the top half constitutes a solid pink sky; the bottom half is strewn with browns, greens and ochres against…

Vincent van Gogh must have seemed omnipresent when Les Levine, pioneering video artist and self-identified 'media sculptor', produced Analyze Lovers: The Story of Vincent for Utrecht's Centraal Museum in 1990. It was the centennial of Van Gogh's death; he was the subject of numerous blockbuster exhibitions; and his paintings were regularly breaking auction records. Levine's video, currently on view at Ulrik alongside a selection of related works, gently parodies efforts to locate meaning within art and to separate, if possible, artists from ir mythologies. The video begins and ends with a young girl using dolls to matter-of-factly recount the well-worn tale of a suffering artist at his lowest moment. Playing a knife-bearing Van Gogh, Disney's Dewey Duck advances on a My Little Pony figurine that represents the artist's friend and…

In 'New Waves' at Perrotin, four large-scale, elegantly minimalist photographs by Leslie Hewitt rest on the floor leaned against the wall - an irregular display tactic that the artist frequently employs. Embracing the dimensional space of the room, these works breach the invisible boundary between image and viewer; their physical weight and heft position them as discrete sculptural entities. Referencing the concept of mise-en-abyme, or the image within the image, the photographs depict tidy arrangements of objects staged on a floor and leaning against a wall. In each, the thin edge of a plywood square is perched atop one or two piles of books, gently compressing the volumes with its weight. Mimicking the installation of the photographs in the gallery, the flat plane of this tilted board faces the viewer…

'Urgency of Existence', Kader Attia's first solo exhibition in Southeast Asia, showcases a selection of the French-Algerian artist's immersive installations as well as recent video and textile works. As the show's title suggests, Attia's oeuvre prompts existential questions. Rooted in the artist's commitment to repair without erasure, his work is concerned with the personal and collective traumas that our bodies carry, the effort to heal from (or learn to live with) past afflictions and the storytelling power of mundane objects. With its visceral, confrontational tone, On Silence (2021/24) elicits a sense of unease. Suspended from the ceiling by wires, a tangled constellation of used prosthetic limbs forms a strange labyrinth. While there is no clear indication of these found objects' individual provenance, Attia has suggested that they belonged to survivors…

Cultural institutions often function like reservoirs: repositories in which artefacts are collected before being released to the public in a more easily digestible form. Whether historical or contemporary, natural or man-made, museum objects are invariably presented at a remove from everyday life. Marie Matusz's solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, 'Reservoir', deconstructs this artificial division in an installation that spans painting and sculpture, sound works and print. A continuation of Matusz's long-term engagement with vitrines, three display cabinets stand on a newly installed zinc panel floor in the centre of the first room. Exactingly placed and obliquely lit to cast architectural shadows, these dark wooden forms subdivide the Kunsthalle's open-plan hall into four eerie zones. Unlike their more typical museal counterparts, these vitrines have their glass fronts slid open, thereby eliminating…

WHAT LONGING EYES he has. Reticent but undoubtedly alluring, they are often cast downward, gazing from elevated windows or at illumined screens. They belong to Najib, the young French-Lebanese protagonist of Valentin Noujai"m's 24-minute film, Oceania (2024). Situated in an apartment complex in a hushed French suburb, Noujai"m's short subtly unravels the haunting traces of interwoven world-historical events, which pierce the quotidian, 'post'imperial normalcy that otherwise saturates the film's European setting. The narrative is set in motion when Najib overhears his mother learning of the sudden death of their Algerian neighbour, Amir, whom she had cared for in his old age. Stealthily grabbing the keys to Amir's apartment, which have fallen into his mother's possession, Najib, by way of an unspoken desire, repeatedly lets himself into the deceased neighbour's home…

MY STORY is a very simple one, although it might not be the kind you would expect to hear from a female director from Uzbekistan. My father is a filmmaker. After studying at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, he worked as a director of photography in Uzbek cinema from the 1960s onwards. In 1992, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he created a director of photography faculty in Uzbekistan. He understood the importance of establishing an educational system for filmmakers within Central Asia and became totally invested in his pedagogical career. Now in his 80s, he still teaches. Growing up in Tashkent, we lived in an apartment building where all our neighbours worked in the film industry. It was like a cinematographic ecosystem: downstairs was a cinematheque;…

The film opens with an overhead shot of hands shuffling a deck of tarot cards and setting them down on a patterned jacquard fabric. 'Coupez Mademoiselle', says the voice of the fortune teller, asking her client to cut the deck. The cards are laid down in a grid of nine and, as they are turned over, we see a suite of 19th century images of courtiers, constellations and classical mythological scenes in pale blues and greens. But this fortune is a hard one to read, and these cards are cleared away in favour of a more traditional tarot deck with bright, almost-lurid woodcut images rendered in thick black lines filled with red, yellow and blue. The force of this palette is important: we are nearing the close of the film's…

Michael Asher: a comedian of the first order. His artworks mostly discrete commissions render their prompts ridiculous and expose their underlying ironies. They obviate post hoc commodifi-cation, eschewing authorship in their final presentation. Take his contribution to the September 1975 issue of Vision - on view in Asher's current survey at Artists Space, New York which invited artists to 'show whatever they wanted to represent themselves'. Asher responded by asking that his name be included in the table of contents and that his allocated 'two facing pages' be glued together. The result: 'one leaf that differed in weight and thickness from all the other leaves in the magazine' (Asher, Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979, 1983). I noticed someone flipping through the issue on display, looking for the art; I smiled,…

The axis on which 'The Living End' turns is there in its subscript: 'Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020'. Painting is positioned not at odds with new apparatuses, but as a technology itself - one of many systems used to make sense of the visual world. As technologies go, however, it's a porous one, absorbing emergent mechanisms and methods as it advances. "The Living End' explores the ways in which nascent replicative technologies necessitated that artists not just make paintings but also perform the making of a painting. As the exhibition leads viewers from the mid-1960s to the present, a throughline emerges wherein artists harness technologies in service of documenting the performance of painting itself as a means of both asserting themselves as painters and destabilizing this very stance. Several artists…

Gabriel Orozco has spent four decades harnessing play's power to spark creative thinking. In 'Politécnico Nacional' (National Polytechnic) at Museo Jumex in Mexico City - the pioneering conceptual artist's first museum show in his homeland since 2006 - curator Briony Fer presents 300 materially disparate artworks across four floors, each themed around air, earth, water and compost. Despite these curatorial categorizations, however, one core motif unites his polymath practice: the gambit. Six ceiling fans swirl over the show's top floor, the breeze stiffening their billowing toilet-paper streamers (Toilet Ventilators, 1997). Orozco's greatest hits lie beneath, illustrating his talent for thwarting expectations with singular moves. An edition of his iconic compacted Citroën, La D.S. (Cornaline) (2013), still delights. Horses Running Endlessly (1995) seems similarly recognizable at first. Closer inspection reveals the…

Showcasing the creative dexterity and range of the work of the late composer, musician and artist Ryuichi Sakamoto, 'seeing sound, hearing time' at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo is an exhibition of three-dimensional sound installations, a number of which are restagings or posthumous responses made collaboratively with figures such as artist Shiro Takatani and filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. While Sakamoto is widely celebrated for his contributions to pop music (he co-founded the electronic band Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1978) and movies (he scored Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, 1983, and The Last Emperor, 1987, among many others), this exhibition focuses on his artworks to reveal a lesser-known - albeit still music-driven aspect of his creative practice. The elegant yet melancholic works on display feel abundant despite their spare aesthetics. IS YOUR…