Features

Meaning, memory and mockery

Continuing our series looking back at the highlights of 2012 and thinking ahead to some reasons to be cheerful in 2013, as chosen by frieze editors and contributors.

Continuing our series looking back at the highlights of 2012 and thinking ahead to some reasons to be cheerful in 2013, as chosen by frieze editors and contributors.

The first in a series looking back at the highlights of 2012 and thinking ahead to some reasons to be cheerful in 2013, as chosen by frieze editors and contributors.

Andreas Slominski has turned traps into sculptures, jokes into performances and, most recently, Polystyrene into paintings. Despite almost three decades of work, Slominski’s art remains based on absence.

Jessica Warboys works with film, painting, sculpture and stained glass. But her main medium may be our ability to recognize resemblances

How does Édouard Glissant’s demand for opacity translate into art? Jan Verwoert explores opacity as a model for open communication – and outlines a history, which runs from Lygia Clark’s sculptures to Trisha Donnelly’s enigmatic films

Korpys/Löffler document the rituals of political power that take place, not behind the scenes, but in plain sight

Posters, pots and fingerprints

Deserts, ideologies and relics

Smoking, kissing and storing data

From Oskar Schlemmer and Cindy Sherman to Seth Price, Michael Portnoy and K8 Hardy, generations of artists have employed the codes of fashion and costume design. Vivian Sky Rehberg takes stock of the traffic between the worlds of art and dress

There is a resurgence of interest in the essay, with collections by Jonathan Lethem, John Jeremiah Sullivan and the first biography of David Foster Wallace all published this year. Is it possible to define a form that stretches from Michel de Montaigne to Wayne Koestenbaum, from Virginia Woolf to Chris Marker? Brian Dillon surveys this enigmatic field, and asks whether this centuries-old tradition might be the genre of the future

In her videos and installations, Gitte Villesen uses simple methods to create compelling biographical portraits

‘When it fills up at the end of the week, you think, “Okay, I have done something!”’

Roe Ethridge’s work circulates in the worlds of fashion, commercial and art photography. Christy Lange considers his ‘chaotic inventory’.

In recent years, the work of self-taught artists has come to be contextualized within larger narratives of contemporary art. How is Outsider Art best understood and what does this definition mean when ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ become blurred? How does it relate to fraught issues of education and exclusion, originality and exploitation? Jonathan Griffin invited Robert Gober, Matthew Higgs, Paul Laffoley and David Maclagan to discuss these questions

The New York-based artist talks about character, the West Coast, process and slime

Post-colonial Angola; photography as both ‘pliable fiction’ and ‘weapon of intervention and denunciation’

Interventions in Bucharest's history of state bureaucracy and brutalist architecture