Issue 194
April 2018

In the new edition of frieze considers surface tenderness and utopian love in the paintings of Njideka Akunyili Crosby. We ask, is the story of ‘civilisation’ inevitably defined by violence and fear, and how can a public artwork respond to state histories of theft and suppression? We also look at Paris’s new museum-as-machine, Los Angeles’s recently restored public musical sculpture and the revival of interest in surrealism. Featuring Mark Cousins, Mary Reid Kelley & Patrick Kelley, Michael Rakowitz and Pan Yuliang.

From this issue

Three leading artists explore the complex notion of a multi-ethnic national identity in post-globalization China

BY Colin Chinnery |

Under a metahistorical guise, the filmmaking duo enact hidden tyrannies of the contemporary age

BY Harry Thorne |

The filmmaker and writer on the novelists, musicians and directors – from Egon Schiele to Virginia Woolf – who have shaped his thinking

BY Mark Cousins |

With his fourth plinth commission unveiled in London, the artist talks archaeological magic tricks and Saddam Hussein’s obsession with Star Wars

BY Evan Moffitt |

A brief look at arts funding, the future of museums, and the dangers of efficiency

BY Paul Teasdale |

Critiquing the dominance of the white imperial gaze at Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto

BY Jill Glessing |

Sam Thorne on the abundance of artists creating clouds, or works that cloud our vision 

BY Sam Thorne |

Andrew Durbin on Some Trick, an experimental collection steeped in the author's knowledge of classics and mathematics

BY Andrew Durbin |

Jörg Heiser on the Soviet sci-fi classic Planeta Pur, algorithmic bias and the limits of artificial intelligence

BY Jörg Heiser |

Madeleine Thien takes a look at a celebrated painter who merged Western composition with Chinese brush-and-ink style

BY Madeleine Thien |

Surreal currents, charged objects and deformed bodies in the work of four emerging British painters

BY Matthew McLean |

From Better Things to Motherhood and SMILF: Michelle Orange charts the turn towards nuanced representations of women in film and TV

BY Michelle Orange |

The artist's layered, tender paintings consider the history of being seen and touched by black women

BY Simone White |

The artist restages and reconsiders the legacies of historical female intellectuals at Foskal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw

BY Krzysztof Kościuczuk |

At Casa Triângulo, São Paulo, a fully biodegradable installation highlights society’s wasteful patterns of consumption

BY Camila Belchior |

At Schiefe Zähne, Berlin, the artist creates an inventory of values we privately sustain but rarely admit

BY Pablo Larios |

The Triforium – Los Angeles’s weirdest and most reviled public artwork – awakes from a long slumber

BY Evan Moffitt |

In her current solo show at Kunsthalle Zurich, the artist's sculptures propose new manners of dwelling and co-existence

BY Laura McLean-Ferris |

Q: What should stay the same? A:‘The North Pole.’

BY Jose Dávila |

'Frontier' at OCAT, Shanghai traces contemporary Chinese art's geopolitical concerns and the new complexities of living in a cosmopolitan world

BY Alvin Li |

The artist brings systems of exclusion and exploitation to light at Apalazzo Gallery, Brescia

BY Barbara Casavecchia |

Bétonsalon & Fondation d'enterprise Ricard, Paris, France

BY Amy Sherlock |

Lynne Tillman on Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread, a tightly wrought film about a tightly controlled man

BY Lynne Tillman |

Artists from the Baltic region navigate volatile pasts and precarious presents at Kiasma, Helsinki

BY Harry Thorne |

Scenes of an America long gone – or perhaps which never was – at MoMA, New York

BY Amy Zion |

Questioning the way that we interact with violent colonial histories at Portikus, Frankfurt

BY Viktoria Draganova |

Questioning the hierarchy of objects and our fragmentary approach to knowledge at the Whitechapel Gallery, London

BY Aliya Say |

The artist investigates tensions between the sturdy and the fragile, and the public and the private at VI,VII, Oslo

BY Timotheus Vermeulen |

The artist explores the politics of the female voice that speaks out, or is shut up, at àngels barcelona, Spain

BY Max Andrews |

At the Hammer Museum, LA, the curator casts a witty, critical eye on the vexed role of institutions contextualizing the art they display

BY Jonathan Griffin |

The artist's ominous paintings suggest imminent threat and moral decline at Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry

BY Hettie Judah |

At La Panacée, Montpellier, Nicolas Bourriaud’s manifesto for a new movement and attempt to demarcate an artistic peer group

BY Max Andrews |

The artist's early works amalgamate nature and technology at Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

BY Josephine Graf |

Images of sexual experimentation and chemical consumption recur in 'Sophie Podolski: Le pays où tout est permis' at WIELS, Brussels 

BY Natasha Soobramanien |

Viewers of the artist's exhibition ‘Let It Come Down’ at Bonner Kunstverein, Germany, experience the curious inbetweenness of a limbo state

BY Noemi Smolik |

Design-focused, craft-based and entwined in the politics and poetics of movement, the NGV Triennial’s most memorable works are future-orientated

BY Ena Grozdanic |

Barbara Wien, Berlin, Germany

BY Ben Fergusson |

Galerie Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf, Germany

BY Moritz Scheper |

Hales Gallery, London, UK

BY Daniel Culpan |

Lévy Gorvy, New York, USA

BY Andrew Hultkrans |

Nottingham Contemporary, UK

BY Orit Gat |

Modern Art Oxford, UK

BY James Attlee |