Frieze Week is like a choose-your-own-art-adventure festival. With so many offerings from around the art world, its events bulge into the adjacent weeks and are as much about what happens outside the Frieze art fair as it is about what happens within. My diary suggests it lasts about 10 days and features a dizzying number of breakfasts, tours, VIP access events, openings, drinks, dinatoires and afterparties. My strategy is to try to balance my time between the blockbuster events and the intimate small-scale moments, interspersed with meetings with artists, curators and collectors. As a person from the Southern Hemisphere based in London, I am particularly excited to see what artists and galleries make it to London from further afield and this year was especially impressive.
Early in the festival of earthly delights, The Barbican opened The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998. As the first show curated by the recently appointed Head of Visual Arts, Shanay Jhaveri, the exhibition presented an impressive selection of works, mostly transported from India, exploring how 30 artists responded to the socio-political climate of the world’s largest democracy bookended by Indira Gandhi’s declaration of a state of emergency in 1975 and the Pokhran nuclear tests in 1998. I was particularly drawn to Nilima Sheikh’s harrowing When Champa Grew Up (1984-1985) painted series depicting a girl married into an abusive relationship and her sumptuous large-scale textile-based installation Shamiana (1996) drawing from mythology and Indian folktales to explore celebrations, mourning and protests. Expanding on one of the artists in the Barbican exhibition, Vadehra Art Gallery presented a moving series of Sudhir Patwardhan’s paintings at Frieze no. 9 Cork Street. Patwardhan explores Mumbai’s complex social fabric through his richly detailed depictions of the intricacies and complexities of the urban environment.
The Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern is the traditional marking point for when Frieze is officially upon us and this year’s artist, Mire Lee, brought an installation of hanging ‘skins’ and turning machines to evoke the ghosts of workers and machinery which used to inhabit the space. As murky fluid dripped from the slowly turning machine at the centre of the installation, my intestines seemingly mirrored the churning metalwork, though my former colleagues at Tate assure me the skins are definitely vegan. While Open Wound (2024) could easily be confused with a scene from a horror film, the installation which successfully fills the gargantuan space is described as an industrial womb ‘finding human dreams and desires in sprawling mechanical systems’.
Later that week the fully immersive gesamtkunstwerk emajendat by Lauren Halsey opened at Serpentine. Halsey transformed the former teahouse into an extravagant ‘funk garden’, layering from floor to ceiling a complex tableau of thousands of CDs, pharaonic busts, cat statues, palm trees and collages of found materials celebrating the distinctive visual language of her South Central LA neighbourhood. A triumphant water fountain made of large hands with long talons of bejewelled nails forms the centre of the installation. As one of the most photographed works of the week, emajendat littered social media as a reflection of the astonishment of early audiences who found the sprawling maximalist installation delightful.
From one Royal Park to another, the Frieze art fair in Regent’s Park did not disappoint. The annual outdoor sculpture exhibition included an exquisite Leonora Carrington bronze called The Dancer featuring a multi-armed humanoid figure replete with a three-eyed falcon head and multi-pronged tongue. Inside the tent, Proyectos Ultravioleta presented yet another brilliant booth featuring a series of works by the visionary artist, Edgar Calel, but this time displayed alongside historical miniatures by Rosa Elena Curruchich. The two Mayan Kaqchikel artists drew from Mayan customs and spirituality rightfully resulting in Proyectos Ultravioleta winning the Frieze London Stand Prize – for the second time.
I was particularly happy to see Artist-to-Artist return. This section features six ‘new voices’ individually selected by more senior contemporary artists. To be selected by eminent artists, such as Rashid Johnson, Zineb Sedira and Hurvin Anderson provides greater meaning beyond the commercial success of these booths at the art fair. I spent a few minutes – a luxury in the gargantuan tent – in two booths. Nengi Omuku was selected by Yinka Shonibare CBE and she showed vibrant landscapes painted on suspended sanyan, a Yoruba hand-spun fabric. Magda Stawarska, selected by Lubaina Himid, presented highly detailed interiors as part of her installation of paintings, silkscreen-printed wallpaper and piccolo projections. I wish I had more time to spend with the other artists’ works but was carried through the fair like a leaf in a stream.
Ceramics were a particularly pertinent theme of the fair this year, mostly due to Pablo José Ramírez’s apt selection of works for the curated Smoke series of booths exploring ‘the bond between ceramics and Non-Western histories’. Often falling outside the materials popularly featured in art fairs, it is intriguing to reflect on how familiar ceramics are universally and historically in the home, offices, restaurants and elsewhere. The spotlight on non-Western artists provided insights into matrilineal wisdom, earth-body connections and ancestral evocations. I lingered on Lucía Pizzani’s large-scale earthenware sculptures with effective use of black slip to create thickly demarcated patterns and Roksana Pirouzmand’s intimate depictions of figures merging with landforms in her series like a stream in the mountains, like lava in a volcano (2024). Elsewhere in the fair, ChertLüdde showed one of Gabriel Chaile’s apparently functional clay ovens which visitors to the 2022 Venice Biennale will recall.
Meanwhile in the other tent – Frieze Masters – two artists popped out to my delight: Baya Mahieddine and Chico da Silva. Elmarsa Gallery presented a series of Madieddine’s decorative Matisse-infused gouaches of women in Algeria while Galatea showcased da Silva’s fantastic universes of dragons, birds and watery creatures. Both artists stood out amongst the crowd for their vivid use of colour and pattern erroneously described as naïve when they prove that mastery of colour and form often flourishes outside Western art school systems. In contrast, there were also subtler moments such as those discovered in the intimate drawings of Yun Suknam in Hakgojae Gallery’s booth. Some of these drawings came directly from the artist’s visual diary and demonstrated a restrained linear exploration of the complexities of the artist’s experienced and observed contradictions, such as Meditation and Delusion (2002).
Although I often feel my diary is at risk of becoming overly planned, I feel it’s important to leave space for the unexpected adventure a friend or happenstance can lead me to. This resulted in some of the most satisfying discoveries. 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning opened Slippage: the Caribbean in Flux, which I popped into on my way to Frieze and was captivated by Marisa Willoughby-Holland’s highly detailed painted depictions of women in tropical environments, in a boat, or as an island. Drawing from surrealist motifs, Willoughby-Holland reinvigorates Renaissance-like depictions of lace and patterned textiles on her subjects ensuring each one is treated more immortal than a Queen. Mimosa House held a refreshingly unvarnished panel discussion on curating feminism which accompanied the fourth chapter of a series of exhibitions on transfeminisms. The display included Buhlebezwe Siwani’s video AmaHubo (2018) which Tate acquired at Frieze in 2020, showing the long-lasting effects of this busy week.
Amongst the busyness of Frieze, there were two experiences where time seemed to slow down. I ventured to Venetia Nevill’s We belong to the Earth at The Bhavan in West London. Nevill’s practice is deeply entwined with her custodianship of a well near her home in Tunbridge Wells which she restored, creating numerous works from the iron-infused water and surrounding trees. Reflecting on how Indigenous art is often concerned with practices around how humans belong to nature, Nevill reminds us that custodianship continues today in Britain and is part of contemporary art. Towards the end of Frieze, I experienced Moe Satt’s performance F n’ F (Face & Fingers) in the South Tank at Tate Modern. Developing over 100 ‘hand sculptures’, the Burmese artist and three other performers created a series of gestures and whistles which eventually drew in the entire audience’s participation.
Frieze may be as much about what is outside the tents as what is within, but it’s also as much about what is not seen as what is experienced.
When looking back on the Frieze that was, there is one work I felt encapsulates the reality of an imperfect curator attempting to see as much as humanly possible while simultaneously accepting the inevitable missed moments too. Nairy Baghramian’s show Jumbled Alphabet at South London Gallery brings sculptures from her Misfits series which disrupts the concept of children’s toys fitting perfectly together and instead, as stated in the exhibition text, “celebrates the beauty of things that don’t fit and the creativity found in what’s considered dis-functional“. This compassionate portrayal of humanity’s beauty touched me deeply during my whirring around London, reminding me of “the magic of being an outsider and seeing the potential in imperfection”. Frieze may be as much about what is outside the tents as what is within, but it’s also as much about what is not seen as what is experienced.
(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.)