Frieze Projects 2017: Artists Announced

This year’s non-profit programme of new artist commissions at Frieze London is curated by Raphael Gygax (Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich) and will feature eleven artists from eight countries across the world. Frieze Projects and the Frieze Artist Award are supported by the LUMA Foundation for the third consecutive year.

Marc Bauer, Donna Kukama, MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho, Lucy + Jorge Orta, SPIT! (Carlos Motta, John Arthur Peetz, Carlos Maria Romero), Georgina Starr and Frieze Artist Award-winner Kiluanji Kia Henda will create seven new artworks spanning literature, theatre, design and installation, all connected by a strong performative aspect.

‘Focused on artistic collaboration, this year’s Projects explore “communitas” – the construction of collective identity – and society’s relationship with the “Other”. During insecure times, we have always intensified the use of symbols and the performance of rituals to face change and create security. We asked artists from different generations and four continents to explore these questions: How can we create a communal moment? Can the temporary intensity of art fair be a place where transformative rituals take place?’ -Curator Raphael Gygax 

• In their passport project Antarctica, British-Argentine artist duo Lucy + Jorge Orta will envisage new possibilities for community and environment, by inviting visitors to symbolically transfer their individual national identity into that of a collective world citizen.
• Presenting a research project through film and photography, South Korea-based MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho will tell the story of Taesung, known as ‘Freedom Village’, an isolated farming community in the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea that came into being at the end of the Korean War in 1953. A co-commission with HOME (Manchester).
• Closer to home, Swiss artist Marc Bauer explores ideas of identity and society in an extensive wall-drawing installation occupying the fair’s entrance corridor. Bauer takes as his starting point a series of workshops with the thirteen to nineteen-year-old members of Peckham Platform’s Youth Platform
• Historical and contemporary sexual and gender politics are the concern of newly formed artist collective SPIT! (Carlos Motta, John Arthur Peetz and Carlos Maria Romero). In a crossover of queer activism, art and choreographic movement, the Project will culminate in a performance.
• Debuting her first novel Empress 66 99, British artist Georgina Starr, who is known for her seminal video and sound works from the 1990s, will present performative readings inside a sculptural installation.
• South African artist Donna Kukama will host a botanical display of medicinal plants outside the entrance to the fair, in which the artist encourages visitors to take part in a performance of social exchange and empathy. A co - commission with the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.
• Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda – this year’s Frieze Artist Award winner – will explore the recent history of his home country, connecting traditional Bakongo cultures of witchcraft with the influence of Marxism-Leninism on Angolan society after independence.

Frieze Projects will be installed throughout Frieze London in The Regent's Park, 5 to 8 October 2017. Tickets will be released in July.