Editor’s Picks: Mika Rottenberg’s Antimatter Factory

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

Chigozie Obioma, The Road to the Country (2024)

A few years ago, wandering the streets of Edinburgh during the Fringe Festival like a bored aristocrat, I found myself pulled into Assembly George Square for a stage adaptation of Chigozie Obioma’s Man Booker Prize-nominated The Fishermen (2015). The lights were low and the stage was sparse; a few scattered hessian sacks and some upright poles positioned to create a fence. Two actors rotated through dozens of characters, chronicling the fraternal animosities and betrayals of life under military occupation in a small town in Nigeria. Everything else – the lakeside, the canoe, the weapons – were left to the audience’s imagination.

Chigozie Obioma’s new novel, The Road to the Country (2024), returns to the Nigerian Civil War, where a young man, Kunle, joins the army in search of his brother. The story lays bare the desperate realities of conflict, in a style marked by Obioma’s penchant for mysticism and the surreal. His sentences are expertly sharpened; they cut straight through your heart.

Mika Rottenburg, ‘Antimatter Factory’

Exhibition catalogues are too often cast onto the bonfires and recycle bins of forgotten tomes and turgid PDF reads, which is why, I believe, the Museum Tinguely in Basel has gone to great lengths to make sure you read what they have to say about their Mika Rottenburg survey. For those unable to make the trip to Switzerland, the playful online catalogue for ‘Antimatter Factory’ is the next best thing.

The site is divided into six sections, each exploring thematic elements central to the artist’s work. Alongside videos from throughout Rottenburg’s career, the site also includes short stories, recorded talks and links to those all-essential exhibition essays.

Doctor Who (2024 – )

Every fan of Doctor Who, (or ‘Whovian’), has their most-beloved Doctor. For those who came of age in the 1970s, it might have been the rainbow-scarfed Tom Baker. For me, it was the pinstripe-suited David Tennant. As I tune in to BBC One again, to watch my favourite time-traveling hero, it’s clear that the current Doctor, played by Sex Education’s (2019–23) charismatic Ncuti Gatwa, has quickly captured the hearts of a new generation.

After a turbulent and uninspired few years with Chris Chibnall as showrunner, Russell T. Davies (known for Queer As Folk, 1999-2000; Years and Years, 2019; It’s a Sin, 2021) has returned to the series after officially departing in 2010, bringing with him a suitcase full of gripping storylines and intricate villains. With the captivating Millie Gibson portraying Gatwa’s adventurous assistant, I truly feel, for the first time in a while, that all the excitement of the universe is unfolding before me.

^{Main image: Mika Rottenberg, Cosmic Generator (detail), 2017 (video still) Single-channel video installation, sound, colour; 26:36 min, dimensions variable. Courtesy: © Mika Rottenberg and Hauser & Wirth}