Editor’s Picks: Chappell Roan’s Sapphic Country Single

Frieze Editor’s Picks is a fortnightly column in which a frieze editor shares their recommendations for what to watch, read and listen to.

Chappell Roan’s ‘The Giver’ Campaign

It took months after Chappell Roan performed her new lesbian country single ‘The Giver’ on Saturday Night Live – crooning in a gingham ensemble that she ‘get[s] the job done’ – until the official release date (13 March) was announced. In between, she launched a campy promotional campaign to tide her fans over. The popstar – beloved for her sapphic bangers and high-femme drag looks – appears as a dentist, plumber, attorney and construction worker on city billboards and fliers distributed throughout the US; her services are advertised with taglines like ‘YOUR WIFE’S HOT! I’LL FIX HER AIR CONDITIONER’. When you call the hotline listed (620-HOT-TOGO) and follow the star-operator’s phone tree, the hold music teases snippets of her song. Roan’s joyful, queer sense of play, paired with her vocal support for LGBTQ+ rights, offers a little light in dark times.

Sin Wai Kin, The Time of Our Lives (2024)

I’ve always found sitcoms a bit unnerving: the predictable and plodding plotlines, the way even viewers’ laughter is preordained. Toronto-born, London-based artist Sin Wai Kin takes the weirdness of the genre and runs with it in The Time of Our Lives (2024), a faux-sitcom currently having its US debut in their exhibition ‘The End Time!’ at Canal Projects in New York. The two-channel video follows V Sin, a drag queen clad in a white minidress, and Wai King, a vermilion-haired stud in a blazer, as they teleport in and out of a film set made to resemble a suburban home. Sometimes freezing or glitching, they chaotically whirl through life milestones: marriage, baby, graduation. (The Storyteller, a cosmic character surrounded by out-of-synch clocks, occasionally interjects; everyone is played by the artist, who got their start performing drag.) The couple discusses quantum entanglement and theories of time (with a nod to queer time), eliciting audience laughter on the screen opposite with one-liners like ‘I want to choose a different past.’ When a countdown lands us in a new world, they get a standing ovation.

Hito Steyerl, Medium Hot (2025)

Set to be released by Verso in May, Hito Steyerl’s Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat (2025) comprises 11 careening, tangent-rich texts on art and technology, one of which approximates a choose-your-own-adventure game. The German artist-theorist wrote the book between 2017 and 2024, and it covers ample ground – beginning with her coinage of a variant on German filmmaker Harun Farocki’s ‘operational images’, which she terms ‘da/mages’, or images that are used as data to feed destructive practices like warfare, extractivism and surveillance. With a title that riffs on Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s notions of ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media, Medium Hot creatively speculates on various forms of heat: the links between artificial intelligence and global warming; an artwork-incinerating blaze that could be partly attributable to illegal cryptocurrency mining; Prometheus syndrome among AI executives. Particularly with the rise of generative AI, images are changing; Steyerl’s book offers up theoretical tools and language to grapple with what that means.

_{Main image: Sin Wai Kin, The Time of Our Lives (detail), 2024, film still. Initiated by Accelerator and co-produced with Kunsthall Trondheim, Canal Projects and Blindspot Gallery. Supported by Vince Guo. Courtesy: the artist}