Frieze - Issue 243 - May 2024

In this issue

In the May issue of frieze, writer Lynne Tillman speaks to artist Joan Jonas as she prepares for her current show at MoMA. Plus, Thomas J. Lax, Rodney McMillian and Zoé Whitley pen a survey on the iconic exhibitions at Studio Museum in Harlem and the projects that shaped them.

Winner Takes It All

IN THE EARLY 1990S, Donald Rodney assembled a collection of more than 100 cheap sporting and academic trophies, such as those typically available in local shops, and displayed them on shelves that ran the length of the gallery wall, and in purpose-made glazed and mirrored cabinets.

1 min

Hidden Passages

OVER THE PAST FEW DECADES, curatorial discourse has reached a crescendo, to the point where it can sometimes feel as though the contextualization of art is so extensive that it risks overwhelming the very work it is intended to substantiate.

3 mins

Cool Connection

ON A STREET IN HARLEM, New York, in 1963, a Black child runs back and forth.

3 mins

Open Invitation

HOSTING PERFORMANCE in institutions, particularly those that have historically presented more traditional formats, is both tempting and tricky.

2 mins

Faerie Tales

ON A HOT SUMMER’S DAY, in a cramped Manhattan apartment, Leslie Bright totters between the telephone and the dresser, complaining of old age and heartache.

5 mins

Ghislaine Leung

How to identify Ghislaine Leung amid the lunching crowd at a south London cafe? In this image-greedy world, Leung is that rare creature: a public figure of whose physical person no trace seems to exist online.

8 mins

The Curious Cosmopolitanism of Ali Sultan Issa

How research into historic Afro-Asian solidarities drew a filmmaker into the path of a Zanzibari political revolutionary

6 mins

'My work is not illustrational: it's associative, intuitive.'

LYNNE TILLMAN Joan, you’ve just come from MoMA.

9 mins

A Man Entering America With a Camera

Robert Frank at 100: in the last years of his life, it seemed a plausible enough prospect.

9 mins

Whitney Biennial 2024

With this year’s Whitney Biennial already having been dismissed by many critics (The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vulture) as riskless, I felt hard-pressed to agree.

5 mins

Green Snake: Women-Centred Ecologies

When I was younger, my mother told me a story about a man who travelled to a faraway lake in China, where he met a beautiful young woman dressed in white and spent the night on her boat.

2 mins

Nidhal Chamekh

Taking its title from philosopher Édouard Glissant’s question, ‘What If Carthage Hadn’t Been Destroyed?’ – posed in his book of collected poems Le Sel Noir (The Black Salt, 1957) – Nidhal Chamekh’s latest exhibition, ‘Et si Carthage’, is inspired by the ancient city whose ruins are a ten-minute drive from Selma Feriani’s new gallery space in downtown Tunis.

2 mins

Bettina Pousttchi

‘Progressions’, Bettina Pousttchi’s survey at Zurich’s Haus Konstruktiv, is a striking illustration of the idea that urban space is not only the physical environment of a city – from pedestrian and surveillance structures to actual buildings – but also a projection, subject to both time-bound ideologies driving urban policy and to city dwellers’ subjective memories. Spread across three floors, the exhibition highlights the fluidity with which Pousttchi moves between industrial-scale readymades, urban architecture and photography.

2 mins

Regina José Galindo and Iva Lulashi

The female figure predominates in the works of Guatemalan visual and performance artist Regina José Galindo and Albanian artist Iva Lulashi.

2 mins

Shuvinai Ashoona

Crawling with tentacled creatures, flipper-footed beasts and beaked hybrids, Shuvinai Ashoona’s colourful pencil drawings are playful and fantastical depictions of Inuit life in the Canadian Arctic.

2 mins

Marcel Dzama

Canoe Lake, in Algonquin Park, Ontario, is where the great Canadian landscape painter Tom Thomson occasionally lived and worked – and where, at the age of 39, he drowned.

2 mins

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Frieze Magazine Description:

Frieze is a contemporary art magazine, published eight times a year. It was founded in London in 1991 and is renowned for publishing essays, profiles, interviews and reviews by today’s leading writers, artists and curators. Across all platforms and live events frieze elevates the provocative, brilliant and leading voices who shape and challenge today’s art world.