Issue 203
May 2019

frieze editor Andrew Durbin delves into cover artist Janiva Ellis’s ruptured figurative paintings; Sarah Manguso contemplates the work of Vija Celmins and the art of reckoning with silence; Ben Mauk unpacks the work of Natascha Süder Happelmann and the problem of representation in large-scale exhibitions; queer cyberfeminist Shu Lea Cheang speaks to artist Zach Blas about surveillance, control and the pleasures of the panopticon; and Tony Cokes recodes Kodwo Eshun’s memorial lecture for Mark Fisher for the issue’s visual essay.

Plus, 29 reviews from around the world, including reports from four non-profit spaces in London and Gretchen Bender’s first posthumous retrospective at Red Bull Arts New York.

Cover image: Janiva Ellis, Catchphrase Coping Mechanism, 2019, oil on linen, 2.2 x 1.8 m. Courtesy: the artist and 47 Canal, New York; photograph: Joerg Lohse

From this issue

Renato Leotta employs moonlight, waves, dry-stone walls and ‘southern thought’ in order to ‘slow down time’

BY Barbara Casavecchia |

The queer cyberfeminist pioneer’s Taiwan Pavilion in Venice explores surveillance, pleasure and control

BY Zach Blas |

Can Natascha Süder Happelmann succeed in doing away with national ‘representation’ altogether?

BY Ben Mauk |

Ahead of representing Canada at the 58th Venice Biennale, the director discusses his 30-year career making films about Inuit life

BY Zacharias Kunuk |

To address the ‘interesting times’ alluded to in the title of the 58th Venice Biennale, we must challenge the language we use to describe them

BY Andrew Durbin |

An exhibition at Seventeen, London, reflects upon the precarious world that the arts professional must negotiate

BY Paul Rekret |

A retrospective of the late Iranian-American director at Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art shows society in ruin

BY Stanton Taylor |

Artists Barby Asante, Libita Clayton and Ashley Holmes are reimagining what it means to go back home

BY Kadish Morris |

This specially-commissioned visual essay by Tony Cokes draws from theorist Kodwo Eshun’s moving epitaph for his friend, the critic Mark Fisher

BY Tony Cokes |

From Mx Justin Vivian Bond to Andy Warhol: fan artists in New York

BY Olivia Laing |

An exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, examines Johns’s recent paintings and how the artist’s intentions remain steadfastly encrypted

BY Jack McGrath |

From viral slime to medieval botany, these artists are probing the margins of mainstream knowledge 

BY Mimi Chu |

How archival collections are being re-animated via new technologies

BY Ellen Mara De Wachter |

After years in the critical wilderness, Pattern and Decoration, the first postmodern art movement, is being reassessed by a number of exhibitions in Europe and the US 

BY Amy Sherlock |

Against a growing digital landscape, cinema magazines dedicated to print are on the rise

BY Erika Balsom |

The artist takes us through her multi-faceted practice, now on view in her retrospective at Museum Ludwig, Cologne 

BY Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu |

Online feuds, real lives and artistic licence

BY Jörg Heiser |

Q: What do you like the look of? A: A clear bright sky in the morning

BY Ralph Rugoff |

In a solo exhibition at kurimanzutto, Mexico City, the artist’s hanging sculptures are, like human beings, contingent, needy and ever-changing

BY Kit Schluter |

Concurrent exhibitions at mother’s tankstation in Dublin and London are the product of more than 40 years of patiently observing the surrounding world

BY Gemma Tipton |

On the emergence of transgender literature

BY Juliet Jacques |

At Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, the Karachi-born artist’s first solo exhibition in Russia sees Western modernisms turned against themselves

BY Figgy Guyver |

The artist depicts the archetypal women of the golden age of film – or reveals them through their absence

BY Moritz Scheper |

At Berlin’s Galerie Neu, a small triumph for nightlife anti-hero Daniel Pflumm, his first show at the gallery in 15 years

BY Pablo Larios |

Combining baroque design with folk tradition, the late artist’s work asks: is pattern not the motor of creation?

BY Greg Nissan |

From food delivery apps to public transport, the Berlin-based artists reflect on the changing face of urban life

BY Kito Nedo |

Body and landscape converge in the groundbreaking painter’s first US retrospective at the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

BY Ian Bourland |

Her retrospective at the Met is a five-decade meditation on the vastness of the cosmos and the insignificance of human life

BY Sarah Manguso |

Linder’s ‘Full Service’ at MUDAM, Luxembourg, enacts a clever service economy between performer, viewer and museum

BY Fabian Schöneich |

In a solo show at the McCord Museum, Montreal, the Cree artist’s alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, confronts the horrors of Canadian history

BY Georgia Phillips-Amos |

Ellis’s paintings are spring-loaded with overlapping references to film and television, current events, art and cartoons.

BY Andrew Durbin |

A retrospective at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, showcases the forms and themes that underpin the artist’s singular career

BY Skye Arundhati Thomas |

The symbolism of a failed property development in Turkey 

BY Jennifer Higgie |

Varda (1928-2019) provided a blueprint for an experimental, politically-radical, idiosyncratically personal and wide-eyed humanist cinema

BY Sierra Pettengill |

In two New York gallery shows, the artist’s domestic sets and portraits of celebrities drive home questions of representation in the culture industry

For 40 years, the Italian artist’s work has ‘shocked us into new realities’

BY Aaron Peck |

Once labelled a ‘TV terrorist’, the video artist returns with her first posthumous retrospective at Red Bull Arts New York

BY Masha Tupitsyn |

The Barcelona-based artist’s survey at Lisbon’s MAAT shows the breadth of his experiments in urban architectures and rudimentary materials

BY Cristina Sanchez-Kozyreva |

‘Wherever he is now, I know he is waiting for me. There is so much we did not have the time to address’

BY Simon Njami |

In style as well as substance, the late curator embodied a politics of inclusivity

BY Naomi Beckwith |

The late artist Knud Viktor painted a sonic portrait of the non-human world

BY Steven Zultanski |

A show at London’s Cabinet Gallery gives insight into the great writer’s most troubled period

BY Patrick Langley |

For his first solo show at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, the artist’s five rapturous landscapes channel the cries of condemned and enslaved bodies under empire

BY Shiv Kotecha |

A tribute to the late curator and his belief in the primacy of documentation

BY Osei Bonsu |

The London-based sculptor’s new show at Kunstverein München delves into the queasy malleability of bodies

BY Louisa Elderton |

A Wunderkammer-like exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield shows objects from all times and places alongside the artist’s own ceramic vessels

BY Isabella Smith |

A tribute to the late curator’s support of artists in South Africa and how his writing on them ‘revealed something of his acute sense for history’

BY Sean O'Toole |

A tribute to the Nigeria-born poet, critic and ‘most important curator of his generation’, who persistently bid us to open our eyes

BY Jörg Heiser |

Gaby Sahhar’s solo show explores London city life via pen-and-ink drawings and a video

BY Gabriella Pounds |

Two parallel exhibitions in LA, at Blum & Poe and Nonaka-Hill gallery, show how Japanese artists of the 1980s and ‘90s confronted Postmodernism

BY Olivian Cha |

At Nottingham Contemporary, the artist reflects on intertwined histories of data and digging

BY Hettie Judah |