Beyond brutalism
Modernist architecture is still a big focus for artists – as long as its Eurocentric and male-dominated history can be rewritten while its buildings are celebrated. Frieze Live is one of the fair’s main curated sections, and this year it features British artist Shezad Dawood’s performance piece. Dawood’s work draws on the work of Bangladeshi modernist architect Muzharul Islam, who combined the lessons of western modernism with a Bengali architectural language. It will also feature dancers (wearing costumes by up-and-coming designer Priya Ahluwalia) weaving through a backdrop of fabric hangings, and will be soundtracked by music from electronica act Patten, inspired by Indian poet, musician and Nobel prize winner Rabindranath Tagore, and jazz musician Alice Coltrane.
Brutalism is also presented in the wider fair in Seher Shah and Randhir Singh’s collaborative project Studies in Form for Green Art Gallery’s booth, which shows buildings such as the Barbican in London, Akbar Bhawan in New Delhi and Dentsu Head Office in Tokyo, fragmented and reimagined as cyanotypes – one of the first photographic printmaking processes.
Identity politics
The debate about museum collections and the ownership of artefacts has been addressed at art fairs before, but Jaanus Samma’s installation at the Temnikova & Kasela gallery in Tallinn, Estonia, should be special. Samma is one of the most widely recognised artists from Baltic Europe and has represented his country at the Venice Biennale. His multimedia work shifts shape and style, often looking at national identity and Estonian history through the prism of queer theory. For Frieze, his installation Museum Display features curtains from a Soviet community centre, castrated classical sculptures and a rug made from traditional Estonian mittens.
Rozsa Farkas, director of London gallery Arcadia Missa, says her booth will feature “young artists who think about the politics of representation and engage with figuration and symbolism as a means to open up a certain visual language to conversations on identity”. At Frieze, this means Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings’ collaborative work. Most recently featured in the Kiss My Genders show at the Hayward Gallery in London, this has explored queer social spaces and communities as places of resistance.
The new mainstream
It’s always interesting to see how blue-chip galleries approach new trends. Previous Hauser & Wirth booths have been imaginatively curated (including by Mary Beard in 2017) but this year’s will be more conventional, and representative of current trends. Black American photographer Lorna Simpson and Japanese Gutai group artist Takesada Matsutani are joined by conceptual artist Jenny Holzer and recently “discovered” Phyllida Barlow. Senior director Neil Wenman says: “It’s the best of the best! Museum quality.” That’s one way to describe what was once overlooked by mainstream galleries. Let’s hope it leads to real change in the art industry, and not just nice things to look at at Frieze.
The revival
British-Australian artist Nicholas Pope was a rising star in the 70s art world, representing Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1982. The same year, on a research trip to Africa, he contracted a rare form of encephalitis that resulted in permanent brain damage and a long career break. Now he has been rediscovered and the Sunday Painter gallery in London is showing his sculptural 1995 ceramic installation Yahweh and the Seraphim at Frieze. It veers between the religious and the profane, and his new work references religion in a woozy, sexy, at times grotesque way.
Non-conventional materials
This year’s main curated section is the exhibition Woven, put together by Cosmin Costinas, executive director of the not-for-profit Para Site art space in Hong Kong. The show looks at the legacy of colonialism through the textiles and weaving of artists and galleries mainly from south and south-east Asia. “The history of weaving is both rich and loaded,” Costinas says. “It was marginalised for a long time, in part because it was associated with women and outside a Eurocentric view of art.” Costinas’s selection is multigenerational and includes Indian artist Monika Correa, whose textile works span almost 60 years, and 30-year-old Filipino artist Cian Dayrit, whose weaving looks at the impact of colonialism, ethnography and mythology. Indian-American artist Chitra Ganesh’s presentation for Gallery Wendi Norris promises to be a visual overload of textiles, glitter, mirrored glass and faux fur. It takes Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights as a starting point and features superheroines, comic-book and Bollywood imagery, surrealism and queer theory.
