The Year in Review: Frieze Editors on Art in 2024

Marko Gluhaich What trends have you noticed this year?

Chloe Stead Every year, I express disappointment in the performances I’ve seen, but this year, I finally encountered an example of the gritty body art performance I’d been missing. I didn’t think I cared for Young Boy Dancing Group because they seemed gimmicky – something for Instagram. But this August, I attended a self-titled performance they did, as part of the OFFSITE series by Wehrmuehle, in Berlin and was blown away. They were very gymnastic and acrobatic; there was even a Slip ‘N Slide.

Performance needs stakes, and what I enjoyed about this work is that you could see the performers were really struggling by the end of it. They were cold, wet, tired and miserable – which is what I want out of my performances, to feel like someone suffered for me.

Vanessa Peterson This year’s London Gallery Weekend saw the return of a performance programme for the second time, devised in partnership with UP Projects, which included a performance by artist Nil Yalter and curator Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu [In the Land of Troubadours, 2024]. It highlights a keen awareness that live art is important: I want to feel palpably what people are doing on the stage and, as you say Chloe, to know what the stakes are.

I’ve considered this in relation to the Marina Abramović survey at London’s Royal Academy last year. When an exhibition about a performance artist doesn’t involve the artist herself and, instead, conveys the practice via paraphernalia, what are you missing? I feel like museums still aren’t always sure of how to exhibit performance.

MG I’ve been thinking about how this year’s Joan Jonas exhibition, ‘Good Night Good Morning’, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York demonstrated a sophisticated approach to performance documentation. Perhaps this is simply because Jonas has never been an easily defined artist, and she seems to trouble any generic convention she engages. Kudos to the curatorial team – Ana Janevski, Lilia Rocio Taboada and Gee Wesley – whose multimedia approach enlivened older aspects of a practice that is constantly in exciting revision.

In terms of live performance, I’d be remiss to not mention Ralph Lemon, whose excellent exhibition at MoMA PS1, ‘Ceremonies Out of the Air’, is complemented by a performance programme starting with his latest, Tell It Anyway [2024]. I look forward to attending the rest of the programme: I’ve had numerous, excited conversations about its opener.

Lou Selfridge In the UK, non-institutional performances have been stronger this year. I edited an article about Fierce Festival in Birmingham and kept thinking, ‘I can’t believe I missed that!’ There are these wonderful pictures of Keioui Keijaun Thomas’s Come Hell or High Femmes: The Era of the Dolls [2023], in which she grinds up on an audience member in a lap dance. It was a serious performance about anti-trans violence and racism, with Thomas using ‘fun’ for dialectic purposes. When performance engages with these almost burlesque qualities – performance as something that can be made for and with an audience – it becomes more interesting, even enjoyable. It’s possible to include these playful elements – like the Slip ‘N Slide you were mentioning, Chloe – and use them to do something that is actually serious.

CS Exactly. Another interesting experience for me was Oceanic Feeling [2024], a performance staged by choreographer Faye Driscoll at Rockaway Beach in New York as part of the Beach Sessions Dance Series. I love the idea of staging performance in such a public space: a lot of people attended, some for the performance but others clearly having just stumbled across it. Despite being a very ambitious project, it didn’t feel new to me. I’m tired of watching hot people with undercuts dance around topless.

VP I also enjoyed the performances at Raven Row over the summer that accompanied the exhibition ‘Brecht: Fragments’. There was that sense of not quite knowing what to expect or how things were going to unfold. I think successful performance has to contain uncertainty.

LS I was at Edinburgh Art Festival over the summer to see Prem Sahib’s performance Alleus [2024]. It was in a car park, which the organizers hadn’t shut properly, so there were also a lot of middle-aged people trying to get back to their cars. A big part of the performance involved someone screaming into a microphone and their voice being amplified, which terrified these unwitting bystanders. It seemed like something out of a horror film – but it was nice to see people accidentally engaging with art.

Good performance should be disruptive. That’s what the Abramović show failed to achieve: the spontaneity gets lost when you have to buy a ticket for an exhibition.

MG In frieze’s October issue, to celebrate Yvonne Rainer’s 90th birthday, curator Charles Aubin wrote a brilliant essay about Rainer’s return to choreography and how she has restaged Trio A [1966] numerous times. Her practice is in a great tradition of artists engaging repetition as a feature not a bug.

One of my overall favourite shows this year looked at the practice of another great innovator, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman, at Bozar in Brussels. I specifically appreciated how they highlighted the more artistic contexts in which she showed her work: such as how she remade her documentary D’Est [From the East, 1993] into a multichannel installation, which gained the subtitle Au bord de la fiction [Bordering on Fiction, 1995].

In New York, two exceptional shows that come to mind were by Tiffany Sia at Maxwell Graham and Tolia Astakhishvili at SculptureCenter – artists engaging with moving image, sculpture and installation in innovative and exciting ways. Moving image is a medium that, given the speedy death knell Hollywood has brought for more mainstream cinema, still has a lot of potential and doesn’t feel particularly tired.

VP I would wholeheartedly agree. This year, I’ve felt most excited by film. A favourite exhibition was Rebecca Horn at Haus der Kunst, Munich. Again, that was exploring the histories of performance, moving image and film in a way that felt refreshing. I also enjoyed the palpable sense of the erotic and desire throughout the show.

At this year’s Venice Biennale, the one show I feel the entire editorial team enjoyed was ‘Nebula’, curated by Leonardo Bigazzi and Alessandro Rabottini. It was a sensitively curated show, which rigorously and intelligently showcased artists working in moving image: the show’s curatorial framework that engaged with fog as a metaphor also felt politically astute and considered. The haunting yodelling in Diego Marcon’s Fritz [2024] stayed with me long after I left Venice. That show, and quite a few others that I’ve seen this year that have engaged with the moving image, really helped me to see, as you say Marko, how it feels like a medium full of experimentation and vitality.

CS What have you seen with scrappier budgets? I’m just bringing that up because the ‘Nebula’ show was beautifully done, but clearly very expensive to produce.

MG Maxwell Graham had a great exhibition of two videos by Anna Rubin, one of which, The Gram [2024], was filmed from the perspective of a carrier pigeon. The artist strapped a specially rigged camera to a homing pigeon, which she had trained to follow a particular route over New York. It could have been gimmicky, but it was an awesome and destabilizing work of experimental cinema.

Kobby Adi – whose practice was profiled in the May issue of frieze – made a 16mm film of slowly rotting apples [Cloisters, 2023–24] for the exhibition ‘Cloisters and Instruments’ at the Swiss Institute in New York. Adi is working within a lineage of institutional critique, and this film and its distribution across numerous venues draws attention to the frameworks and limitations related to making work in this genre.

‘Good performance should be disruptive.’ Lou Selfridge

VP In London, I would recommend going to Peer, where Onyeka Igwe’s beautiful film, A Radical Duet [2023], is currently on view. Igwe looks at radical political histories of London from 1947 onwards, such as the work of Black revolutionary thinkers like C.L.R. James and Kwame Nkrumah, and superlatively merges fact and fiction, in the vein of Saidiya Hartman’s ideas of ‘critical fabulation’ from her essay ‘Venus in Two Acts’ [2008].

CS I have a question: was this year the revenge of the critic? We had two biennials – Venice and the Whitney – to which critics responded ambivalently, at best. That then birthed a whole slew of people criticizing the criticism of the biennials.

Particularly after Venice, I feel there has been a reaction, if not to identity politics per se, then to a certain framing of an artist’s practice. There’s a feeling of wanting to be able to look at the art without thinking about where the artist is from.

LS The director of this year’s Glasgow International, Richard Birkett, made a big point of scrapping a theme. The result was a bit messy, but it was an interesting conceit.

VP I enjoyed the open-ended nature of Glasgow International's curatorial framework this year. It enabled offerings as diverse as Susan Philipsz’s installation Radio International [2024], Cameron Rowland’s closure of Ramshorn Cemetery [Obstruction, 2024] and Camara Taylor’s ‘[mouthfeel]’ show at Tramway to co-exist in a smart, considered way. In Venice, many people I spoke to seemed more positive about off-site shows than they did about the biennial itself. Alongside ‘Nebula’, some particularly strong presentations were Peter Hujar’s ‘Portraits in Life and Death’, Julie Mehretu’s ‘Ensemble’ and Yoo Youngkuk’s ‘A Journey to the Infinite’ – all of which spoke, in different ways, to the politics and meaning of making art. Moving image played a key role in my personal standout pavilions, such as John Akomfrah (Great Britain), Julien Creuzet (France) and Wael Shawky (Egypt).

MG I didn’t really read the response to the Whitney Biennial – a show I thought was great, incidentally – as a revenge of the critic, per se. Most of those takes were pretty ambiguous and apathetic and didn’t actually engage with the artworks on their own terms; rather, they demonstrated, to me, an exhaustion with the conditions of art-making and exhibiting at this current moment. I spoke to some who called it boring, but I found that to be unfair because it was a smartly done show with a lot of good art. It’s even grown on me: I am still thinking about it and referring to the artist list. The curators, Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, did a great job.

VP  I feel like I’ve heard so much about the crisis of criticism, or what its value is. Perhaps the methods have changed: you can find moving, challenging, rigorous and, indeed, messy criticism in Instagram captions or Substack newsletters. I’m glad that kind of critical discussion about art is happening today.

LS I got into an argument with several people recently when I told them that I really like a certain critic – who I won’t name – because he does a thoughtful job of writing negative reviews. There’s a lot of crap versions of that, but I prefer it when critics admit that they don’t like something – more people should do it.

CS Readers want to feel like they’re getting an unvarnished opinion. Sometimes, as a critic, I feel stifled when I consider how much effort someone has put into making the work. I’m also aware that artists are real people who may well read my review. It’s a tricky thing to navigate.

LS I think about it a lot, especially with younger artists – it often feels too cruel to really slate them. But then, that’s why someone like Jerry Saltz is so famous: he makes a Facebook post saying something like ‘I don’t like Marlene Dumas’ and suddenly gains social-media followers. That’s not interesting criticism, that’s just being flippant, but it shows there’s a hunger for people to actually have an opinion. I love Dumas, by the way – I don’t agree with him about that …

VP I thought her show at Frith Street Gallery in London, ‘Mourning Marsyas’, was one of the best this year. Also in London, I loved the layers and depth of Emma Prempeh’s paintings at Tiwani Contemporary.

LS Agreed. I feel like there’s a tendency towards a supreme flatness in a lot of paintings that are being shown in London lately, which gets on my nerves. Sometimes it’s done interestingly: Ella Walker’s paintings in ‘The Romance of the Rose’ at Pilar Corrias pulled it off well. But I’ve also seen a lot of bad flat art that looks like someone sat down with an image in their head and then just transcribed it very faithfully, but with no real interest in what they were doing, no feeling.

CS I like my painting like I like my body performance.

LS Painful?

CS Exhausting and blood-soaked. Maybe with some urine. [Laughs.]

LS I like that. Get me more of Andy Warhol’s ‘Piss Paintings’!

_{Main Image: John Akomfrah, Purple, 2017, film still. Courtesy: © Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery}