Frieze New Writers Pick the 8 Best Shows in the UK and Ireland

This Critic’s Guide has been written by the eight participants who took part in this year’s Frieze New Writers programme in Glasgow – a free-to-attend intensive three-day course for aspiring art writers led by the frieze editorial team, supported by Glasgow International and hosted at CCA Glasgow. This initiative is part of Frieze’s wider commitment to amplifying diverse voices within the art world.

Hayley Barker | Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh | 14 June – 31 August

At Ingleby Gallery, Hayley Barker transports her Californian garden idyll to the heart of Edinburgh. Her year-long project, dedicated to the cycle of the seasons, brings the main room to life. In Spring Valentine Path (all works 2024), a gecko scuttles across a stone step beneath a trailing nasturtium plant; in Autumn Moon Garden 2, a windchime sways amongst the treetops, backdropped by an apricot sky. The passage of time is both subject and process; we learn to notice it, like Barker, through changes of tone, light and colour. Barker paints on earthy linen – her considered colour palette, muted yet never dull, giving her works a sense of light, as if they are glowing from within. But this glow has an eeriness to it: that apricot sky now evokes the haze of a forest fire, reminding the viewer how fragile this vision of paradise is. Barker’s gaze bears witness to all creatures great and small, even rocks and stones. – Maxime Swift 

Keith Haring | The Modern Institute, Glasgow | 7 June – 5 September

Keith Haring’s rapidly executed ‘Subway Drawings’ depict figures oozing sex and pleasure as they dance to techno-primitivism. Now, the artist’s career-defining works are the subject of an eponymous exhibition at The Modern Institute’s Bricks Space – a former industrial building fittingly reminiscent of the sites where the works were originally made. Throughout the large-scale drawings on display, such as Blue Caterpillar (1984), chalk figures transmogrify in and out of humanness, with some sporting tails or wings. Untitled (FDR NY) #3 and #4 (1984) – two fragments of a vast, 30-panel mural on which Haring spray-painted his iconic visual constellation – contains a section of indeterminate authorship; the paint a darker shade of red, the movement less crisp. But the panels being grafittied over fit with Haring’s animating principle; after all, it is in this layering of 1980s New York public social life that his work compels the most. – Leo Bussi 

‘Longest Way Round, Shortest Way Home’ | Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin | 6 July – 27 October

Set in the industrial landscape of Dublin Port, ‘Longest Way Round, Shortest Way Home’ comprises two solo presentations exploring themes of maritime trade. Screened above disused machinery at the Pumphouse, Yuri Pattison’s installation dream sequence (working title for a work in progress) (2023–ongoing) features a video that follows the journey of a river, from stream to post-industrial wasteland, soundtracked by an arrhythmic Disklavier piano. Meanwhile, Liliane Puthod’s Beep Beep (2024) – a modified shipping container in the Graving Dock – evokes a domestic garage housing her late father’s Renault 4 car. Initial feelings of transgression, of trespassing in a private domain, are disrupted by neon embellishments that animate the space. While both artists reflect upon the economics of shipping, whether directly or through allusions to vehicle importation, the works carry an underlying sense of nostalgia. Much of what is visible – machinery, fuse boards, oil drums – is now obsolete, lying in wait, like Puthod’s family car, to be reanimated. – Aoife Herrity

Cathy Wilkes | Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow | 7 June – 29 September 

For a show without a press release or checklist, Cathy Wilkes’s new exhibition is punishingly direct. Two vitrines of archival materials – borrowed from Linen Hall library and the artist’s own collection – combine personal artefacts with pamphlets responding to the curfew imposed by the British Army on the Falls district of Belfast in 1970. Images and written accounts attest to the chaos as troops carried out house-to-house searches, ripping up floorboards and smashing furniture as they went. In the gallery, frosted glass sconces illuminate a series of sparse, cream-coloured canvases littered with stains and scraps of black thread. The uneasy reticence of these paintings is ruptured by the exhibition’s centrepiece: a patchworked mannequin that forensically replicates the case of a Belfast woman blinded by a rubber bullet shot through her open window. Wilkes has mined domestic scenes for their latent violence throughout her career, but in this presentation, commissioned by the Imperial War Museum, the state forcibly breaks and enters, shattering all sense of security in the home. – Gabriel Levine  

'brecht: fragments' | Raven Row, London | 15 June – 18 August 

At Raven Row, an exhibition pairing archival material with performance restages the radical oeuvre of German playwright Bertolt Brecht. While offering in places a more conventional display of ephemera – in which you can explore the development of Brecht’s Marxist, anti-fascist politics through his amassed newspaper cuttings, collages and original manuscripts – his thinking is positioned in the present through twice-daily performances of select scenes from his fragmentary, unfinished plays. In The Flood – set in the aftermath of some ambiguous environmental disaster – actors dressed as cardboard cutouts of iconic London skyscrapers perform in the shadow of their full-size equivalents glinting overhead; while The Breadshop – originally written as a montage of destitution and class struggle in the streets of Weimar Germany – still holds relevance today as rushed gig workers shoot past the gallery’s open windows. These heavy themes are lightened by a brilliantly hammy cast who goad the audience through the gallery in a whirling tour of the exhibition. Coupled with tongue-in-cheek costuming that extrapolates the DIY materiality of Brecht’s collages into a form of drag, this brazen revival is a canny reminder of the playwright’s continued relevance. – Jamie Donald

Camara Taylor | Tramway, Glasgow | 7 June – 18 August

Camara Taylor’s exhibition ‘[mouthfeel]’ draws on the artist’s research into archival traces of Black presence in histories of racial capitalism in Scotland. Produced in collaboration with Sharif Elsabagh, Ai Túng and feminist welding collective Slaghammers, the understated show contains free-standing steel works, wall-mounted images, mirrored surfaces, a soundscore – of rushing water and hushed voices – and two television monitors displaying close-up videos of a chocolate coin dissolving on a tongue (all works 2024). Minimal curation lends the show a sense of sanctity despite its sometimes visceral content. Rum cascades hypnotically down Untitled (Falls of Clyde, 1492, 1707–), a wall-mounted fountain connected to an isolated tank with pipes that repeatedly feed the liquor over the rusted steel surface. Instead of solely reading from the archive, the viewer engages with the artist’s research as an active presence. From the aroma of spirits to spit-drenched footage, ‘[mouthfeel]’ depicts history as a tangible substance. – Ruby Johnston  

Ernest Cole | The Photographers' Gallery, London | 14 June – 22 September 

An exhibition of Ernest Cole’s landmark 1967 photobook of the same name, ‘House of Bondage’, revisits the precarity of daily life for Black communities in apartheid South Africa. It contains over 100 monochrome images that record the division of the country’s people across racial lines: Cole captured breezy and lush areas occupied by white people and non-white spaces that seemed cramped and almost uninhabitable. In one untitled photograph, ‘EUROPEANS ONLY’ appears scrawled across a half-empty bench; in another, a sign instructs Black people to enter a building through a backdoor. Cole’s focus on this oppressive municipal signage indicates its prevalence in the country at the time. Towards the end of the exhibition, a display of ephemera, on loan from the Bishopsgate Institute, contains campaign material from the London Anti-Apartheid Group, including posters and pamphlets campaigning for Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and a consumer boycott of South African goods. The cumulative effect of witnessing this material fosters agency and hope, incomplete without the necessity of remembrance. – Simal Rafique 

Alberta Whittle | Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute | 1 June – 25 August 

On the frothing shores of the Isle of Bute sits Mount Stuart, a neo-gothic country home that contains a new site-specific offering by the Barbadian-Scottish artist Alberta Whittle. Weaving together the textures of the island’s landscape, while referencing its rich history of migration, ‘Under the Skin of the Ocean, the Thing Urges Us Up Wild’ is a show of thresholds. Four salvaged doorways (A knock, a kick and we grapevine, all 2024) stand in the Marble Hall. Adorned with shells in various states of disrepair that were gathered from the shores of Bute and Barbados, the timber frames seem to reference the formation of Bute's ancient standing stones. Whittle draws a comparison between the two distinct locations, viewing the surrounding oceans as dichotomously connective and oppressive. The artist seems comfortable operating in these paradoxical spaces, addressing both one thing and its opposite: chaos and order, wildness and discipline, liberty and captivity. Whittle masterfully coaxes resistance and romance together, entangling narratives that span time, space and shorelines. – Holly Allan 

^{Main image: Keith Haring, Untitled (FDR NY) #3 & #4 (detail), 1984, spray enamel paint on metal, 1.2 x 5.2 m, installation view, Keith Haring, ‘Subway Drawings’, 2024, The Modern Institute, Bricks Space, Glasgow. Courtesy: Private Collection and The Modern Institute/ Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow; photograph: Patrick Jameson}