Issue 195
May 2018

The May issue of frieze features a visual essay by Heji Shin; a series of open letters to Adrian Piper; an interview with Maria Hassabi; David Salle's fan letter in praise of George W.S. Trow’s prescient commentary on American culture; and monographs on Ruth Asawa, Than Hussein Clark and Madeline Gins.

From this issue

On the occasion of her MoMA retrospective, six missives to the artist from her peers

A recent show in New York of the filmmaker’s maquettes highlights his insights into contemporary life

BY Negar Azimi |

At the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the artist’s retrospective explores love, loss and identity in the works forged by her AIDS activism

BY Chris Wiley |

New York in spring: Andrew Durbin turns to film as a way of diary-keeping

BY Andrew Durbin |

A group show engaging with botanical histories and nonhuman futures at Edouard Malingue Gallery, Shanghai

BY Xin Zhou |

At Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, the artist’s embroidery challenge the Western middle-class identity and its underlying anxiety

BY Camila Belchior |

The artist’s show at Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland shows her central concern is contingency

BY Jörg Scheller |

At Choi & Lager, Seoul, the artists capture the transience and fragility of contemporary life

BY Yujin Min |

Derek Jarman, circular time and seed catalogues: Olivia Laing takes the long view

BY Olivia Laing |

The artist queers the canonical histories of art and theatre, pointing to how things might actively and fantastically engage in being otherwise

BY Martin Hargreaves |

Paul Rekret surveys ‘chill wave’, the mellow pop, sepia-toned indie and tropical dance tropes in new music releases 

BY Paul Rekret |

70 years since apartheid became law in South Africa, a retrospective of the photographer's work opens at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

BY Osei Bonsu |

An exhibition at CAMERA, Turin, illustrates photography's key role for the enigmatic polymath 

BY Matthew McLean |

How the late artist's transparent sculpture rethinks the relationship between figure and ground

BY Ann Reynolds |

An exhibition of the work of the late Madeline Gins reveals an artist, architect and poet who pushed language into intensely imaginative and speculative realms

BY Lucy Ives |

With his new book How to Write an Autobiographical Novel published today, the writer shares the books that have influenced him

BY Alexander Chee |

Jan Verwoert considers the history of Manifesta, European politics and whether an art exhibition can unlock the historical potential of a place

BY Jan Verwoert |

The renowned Swiss architect and designer duo discuss the influences that have shaped their six-decade careers 

BY Trix and Robert Haussmann |

Before ‘fake news’ and the turn against Facebook, painter David Salle remembers a book that predicted how the media sphere would shatter

BY David Salle |

Ahead of her presentation at Centre Pompidou in June, the artist and choreographer talks about slowness, detail and the anti-spectacular

BY Harry Thorne |

Transforming M HKA Antwerp's IN SITU space into a megaphone that captures sounds – imagined or real – flowing from the city to the museum

BY Kate Christina Mayne |

At Petzel Gallery, New York, an installation of anthropomorphic sea creatures explores sinister forces of authority and violence

BY Andrew Durbin |

At carlier | gebauer, Berlin, the artist explores where the boundary blurs between violence and security in public spaces

BY Kristian Vistrup Madsen |

At the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, a comprehensive look at five decades of the artist's incisive, yet uplifting, practice

BY Natalie Haddad |

At Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Móstoles, a crepuscular glow lends acute poignancy to simple forms and materials   

BY Max Andrews |

A Hollywood actor whose image has become troll-bait is the protagonist of a show exploring cross-cultural identity and misogyny in the internet age

BY Mimi Chu |

At Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York, the artist transposes visions of queer intimacy into an animated technofuture

BY Dana Kopel |

All three galleries of Sprüth Magers’s Berlin space are given over to the late artist’s painterly evolution, much of which is long unseen

BY John Quin |

At Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, Paris, the artist's dialogue with an 11-year-old forms the basis for a work exploring exile and migration

BY Violaine Boutet de Monvel |

A touching show by the late American artist Bruce Conner in an unfinished church is a highlight of the city's burgeoning art scene

BY Cristina Sanchez-Kozyreva |

At Jan Mot, Brussels, nine letters written by the artist track the chilling resurgence of Nazism across the globe in recent years

BY Ellen Mara De Wachter |

From a drone strike in Pakistan to reconstructing Syrian torture cells, a survey of the Eyal Weizman-led 'counter-forensics' agency at London's ICA

BY En Liang Khong |

Two films show ways of approaching and exorcizing the country's troubled past at Emalin, London, UK

BY Anya Harrison |

At 303 Gallery, New York, the artist demonstrates how easily we give meaning to the mundane, and how easily we can give it away

BY Aaron Bogart |

Ahead of the opening of her Tate Britain Duveen Galleries commission The Squash, the Turner Prize nominee answers our Questionnaire

BY Anthea Hamilton |

At Tallinn Art Hall, an international group show grapples with the problematics underlying the concept of national identity

BY Harry Thorne |

A reckoning of dehumanized black identity at Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London

BY Rosanna McLaughlin |

At Matthew Marks Gallery, LA, recreations of natural topographies display a singular relationship to time and observation

BY Olivian Cha |

Kafka's perplexing creature made of tangled threads provides inspiration for a group show at Malmö Konsthall, Sweden

BY Matthew Rana |

Political histories interweave with personal narratives of familial displacement, queer loss and desire at the Guggenheim Museum, New York

BY Shiv Kotecha |

Gritty, overwhelming reality and the business of its staging, at Galerie Bernhard, Zurich

BY Aoife Rosenmeyer |

At Alison Jacques Gallery, London, the late artist's paintings are caught in the act of testing their own mettle

BY Cal Revely-Calder |

At Edel Assanti, London, the artist takes the pulse of modern Britain at its most moribund and pathological

BY Daniel Culpan |