Issue 202
April 2019

Simone Fattal talks to Negar Azimi about her archaeological and formal explorations in collage, paint and sculpture; Pablo Larios investigates how the Bauhaus is being decentred from the Western canon; Cal Revely-Calder pens a picture piece on Samuel Beckett’s Gucci bag; and Hannah Black, Howie Chen, Jamillah James, Ajay Kurian and Suhail Malik share their sobering glimpses into how the project of artistic freedom has been co-opted by the far right.



Plus, 30 reviews from around the world, including reports on the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, and two major solo shows by Mai-Thu Perret at Mamco Genève and Spike Island, Bristol.



Plus much more!

From this issue

Q. What should stay the same? A. ‘Nothing’

BY Pierre Guyotat |

A rare view of Laurie Parsons’s work at Germany’s Museum Abteiberg provides space to reflect on art and social engagement

BY Sarah E. James |

250 works by more than 70 artists and creators from the pre-Columbian period to the present

BY Wilson Tarbox |

In the Iranian artist’s work, memory is smudged, an accretion of sorrows or nameless longings, a pile of waterlogged books in a flooded library

BY Chris Wiley |

An exhibition at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, offers compelling evocations of causality and correlation

BY Jonathan P. Watts |

The sixth edition of the Sri Lankan arts festival uses the sea to press issues of migration and gentrification, climate change and the future of labour in the wake of automation

BY Himali Singh Soin |

Eichhorn’s quasi-retrospective at Zurich’s Migros Museum highlights the artist’s complex contestations in simple, often invisible, form

BY Aoife Rosenmeyer |

In Perret’s two crafts-filled shows at MAMCO, Geneva, and Spike Island, Birstol, she draws from the fabular women of New Ponderosa

BY Paul Carey-Kent |

Mikhailov’s photo series ‘Diary’ cheekily exposes the undersides of social suppression in the USSR

BY Greg Nissan |

The artists’ two-person show at London’s Cell Project Space lays bare the latent economic structures that condition our lives

BY Amy Budd |

The artist’s second solo show at Urs Meile in Beijing uses abstract neons to comment on social realities

BY Nooshfar Afnan |

An immersive installation at Gasworks offers different modes of thinking about ‘the psychic inheritance of an experience for which one has no memory’

BY Derica Shields |

On the centenary of its founding in Weimar, ‘bauhaus imaginista’, which takes place in eleven countries, revisits the Bauhaus with an eye to global experiments in radical artistic pedagogy

BY Pablo Larios |

How much to read into Samuel Beckett’s flirtation with fashion?

BY Cal Revely-Calder |

frieze’s Editor-at-Large considers what it means to move on

BY Dan Fox |

A new series of sculptures is inspired by the Book of Genesis

‘Black people don’t fear the dead, it’s the living we worry about’

BY Nadia Latif |

Lynne Tillman on the clash between real life and expectation

BY Lynne Tillman |

Recent R&B albums by Kelela, Lafawndah, serpentwithfeet and Solange tune to newly radiant blues

BY Harmony Holiday |

As the world tips towards more reactionary and fascistic regimes, what does it mean to call for artistic freedoms that implicitly reproduce oppression?

A provocative exhibition at Casa Luis Barragán reframes the architect’s home and studio through his class and gay identity

BY Evan Moffitt |

The Hong Kong-born artist showcases the darkly comic potential of cartoon visuals

BY Harry Thorne |

On the centennial of Cunningham’s birth, how does his legacy prompt us to talk about othered bodies?

BY Marissa Perel |

Commissioned by Emmanuel Macron, the restitution report by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy has paved the path for former colonisers to return art and artefacts

BY Nicholas Mirzoeff |

Is censoring art the solution to divisive politics? Art historian Susanne von Falkenhausen doesn’t think so

BY Susanne von Falkenhausen |

The artist’s video installation at Berlinische Galerie sheds new light on female strategies of self-staging

BY Grace Sparapani |

These specially commissioned photographs capture an ever-changing city through portraits of friends 

BY Oto Gillen |

Negar Azimi visits the Damascus-born artist ahead of her retrospective at MoMA PS1

BY Negar Azimi AND Simone Fattal |

The work of Martin Creed, Giorgio Griffa and Tatsuo Miyajima all, in their own way, attempt to make sense of a chaotic world

BY Ana Vukadin |

In her solo show at CCA Wattis, San Francisco, the artist invokes sports awards to critique our obsession with victory

BY Travis Diehl |

Domènec’s show at adn galeria, Barcelona looks to the fraught legacies of Spain’s mass communal housing

BY Max Andrews |

An exhibition at Croy Nielsen, Vienna, explores the female gaze on a world which seems murkier than ever

BY Kimberly Bradley |

For her fourth exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, the artist paints portraits from her imagination

BY Thora Siemsen |

A retrospective at Neues Museum Nürnberg assembles the artist’s gleeful critiques of social, political and economic conditions  

BY Kito Nedo |

At Blain|Southern, London, the Mexican artist’s primordial canvases evoke the beginning of the beginning

BY Cal Revely-Calder |

An exhibition at neugerriemschneider, Berlin, explores the healing properties of sticks as a symbol for social change

BY Carina Bukuts |

At Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia, the artist explores technical virtuosity and trompe l’oeil through bronze-branches on fire, fake mirrors and floating candles

BY Barbara Casavecchia |

At Museu de Arte de São Paulo and Casa de Vidro, São Paulo, hand-woven sculptures inhabit the buildings, incorporating tree trunks and branches

BY Camila Belchior |

At the heart of Wächtler’s work at Bergen Kunsthall, is a notion of narrative, however fractured, fugitive, misleading or opaque

The latest edition powerfully frames narratives of colonialism, exploitation and survivance

BY Helen Hughes |

The artist’s new film explores unprecedented levels of intimacy and empathy with its subjects

BY Eliel Jones |

The artist’s first US survey intervenes in the architecture and collection of Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia

BY Bea Huff Hunter |

Baum’s work, on view at New York’s Bureau Gallery, calls attention to the overlooked hand labour of the textile industry

BY Megan N. Liberty |

At Ortuzar Projects, New York, an exhibition explores the artist’s multidirectional storytelling

BY Shiv Kotecha |

At Almanac Projects, London, the artist sheds new light on the way women are turned into objects 

BY Izabella Scott |

From tarot cards to AA flyers, the artist’s installation at Lucas Hirsch, Düsseldorf, sketches out a precarious existence

BY Moritz Scheper |