Issue 212
July–August 2020

‘I am not used to asking for help, but on what kind of a ground am I standing?’ – Etel Adnan

In the July/August issue of frieze, Etel Anan contemplates horizons in an exclusive excerpt from her forthcoming book, Shifting the Silence; Moyra Davey and Kate Zambreno consider Nadine Gordimer’s haunting proposition ‘to write as if you were dead’; and Evelyn Taocheng Wang answers our questionnaire.

Also featuring: an essay by Gary Zhexi Zhang on the parafictional artworks of Cooking Sections, Goldin+Senneby, Sean Raspet and Shengping Zheng, which sit between ecology and industry. A profile by Brian Dillon on the choreographer Michael Clark, who combined classical training, punk, pop and outré fashion to recast London in the 1980s in his own image. 1500 words by poet Bernadette Mayer on the ever-changing colours of the alphabet. And Lynne Tillman responds to a photograph from An-My Lê’s Small Wars (1999–2002).

Plus, a series of columns on games – from Darran Anderson’s memories of Street Fighter II to Simon Denny and Joanna Pope’s reworking of the world’s first socialist board game Class Struggle (1978) – and 21 reviews from around the world, including ‘Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI’ at de Young Museum in San Francisco and ‘Tell Me About Yesterday Tomorrow’ at the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism.

From this issue

From enfant terrible of British ballet to a retrospective at the Barbican Gallery, how the choreographer and performer found a home in the contemporary art world 

BY Brian Dillon |

Negar Azimi on Adnan’s sensuous intellect

BY Negar Azimi |

The artist’s far-seeing experiments with digital avatars and viral antibodies help us better understand ourselves

BY Jennifer Kabat |

The American poet – whose ‘Memory’ is now out from Siglio Press – on the poetics of synesthesia

BY Bernadette Mayer |

Take advantage of 'crisitunities' to defend the rights of workers - or exploit them

BY Simon Denny AND Joanna Pope |

In the work of Cooking Sections, Goldin+Senneby and Sean Raspet and Shengping Zheng the line between synthetic and organic is not always what is seems

BY Gary Zhexi Zhang |

After years of controversy around Zaha Hadid’s doomed proposal, Kuma’s sober design arrived on time and within budget – only for the games to be postponed 

BY Azby Brown |

The authors discuss diary-keeping, photography and motherhood

BY Moyra Davey AND Kate Zambreno |

During the Troubles in Ireland, Darran Anderson remembers finding sanctuary in County Derry’s amusement arcades 

BY Darran Anderson |

From the stadium to the gallery, both attempt to invoke a sense of extreme concentration

BY Orit Gat |

Renowned poet Joan Retallack reads Adnan’s poetry

BY Joan Retallack |

The artist’s exhibition at Mies van der Rohe’s Haus Esters in Krefeld explores architecture’s aim for social reform

BY Moritz Scheper |

The artist’s installation at Barbara Wien, Berlin, leaves things pleasingly open to interpretation

BY Mitch Speed |

‘Have You Seen a Horizon Lately?’ feels like a hauntingly apposite question for these dark times

BY Kito Nedo |

A workshop at a primary school in east London provides an antidote to the seriousness of art criticism 

BY Olamiju Fajemisin |

Pinacoteca de São Paulo presents a number of public-facing projects that correct the record about the famously reclusive artist 

BY Giampaolo Bianconi |

In the time of COVID-19, the artist's pulmonary pangs at ChertLüdde, Berlin, feel uncomfortably prescient

BY Mitch Speed |

At the DeYoung, San Francisco, ‘Uncanny Valley’ deftly examines the consequences of our capitulation to AI

BY Fanny Singer |

At Accelerator, Stockholm, Johanna Gustafsson Fürst reflects on the systematic repression of indigenous languages in her home country

BY Frida Sandström |

At Adams and Ollman, Portland, the artist’s recent paintings depict scenes now impossible in quarantine 

BY Bean Gilsdorf |

Despite being full of great work, this show is at once too broad in its remit and too narrow in its execution

BY Jennifer Higgie |

At Spelman College, the artist’s selection of images from the Johnson Publishing Company celebrates ‘a house that black entrepreneurship built’ 

BY Lauren DeLand |

Saturated with marketing sleights of hand and anti-capitalist theory, her work isn’t to blame, any more than I am for reproducing the same rhetoric here

BY Sophie Ruigrok |

In the face of creeping far-right thinking, an exhibition in Munich underscores the role contemporary art can play in ensuring historic atrocities are never forgotten

BY Kito Nedo |

The artist presents a range of paintings and sculptures at The Contemporary Austin that problematize grand historical narratives 

BY Shiv Kotecha |

The artist’s cardboard interventions remind us that the modernist Heide Museum, Melbourne, was once a home – where people lived and touched

BY Sophie Knezic |

The artist’s new immersive installation at Centre Pompidou explores ecstatic states as a means of reconnecting with human empathy

BY Francesca Gavin |

At the Whitney Museum, an ambitious survey shows the transformative effects of Mexican muralism on the US avant-garde 

BY Jackson Arn |

At the Norval Foundation, Cape Town, the artist’s recent paintings refer to the contentious 2017 re-election of Uhuru Kenyatta 

BY Sean O'Toole |

The artist’s exhibition at Centre d’art contemporain Passerelle, Brest, blends gender, race and class politics with science fiction

BY Wilson Tarbox |

In Prajakta Potnis’s show at Project 88, Mumbai, her uncle’s illness eerily presages the Covid-19 emergency

BY Skye Arundhati Thomas |

Translations of Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah and Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel come together and fall apart in the artist’s latest show

BY Cal Revely-Calder |