Issue 220
June/July/August 2021

‘It was arte povera with a fuck-you punk feminism.’ – Cerith Wyn Evans on Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas’s The Shop (1993).

In the 30th anniversary issue of frieze, Hilton AlsSadie ColesPauline DalyTracey EminSarah Lucas, Gregor Muir and Cerith Wyn Evans remember The Shop, the artists’ short-lived project space in Bethnal Green, London, which closed on Emin’s 30th Birthday with a party titled ‘Fuckin’ Fantastic at 30 and Just About Old Enough to do Whatever She Wants’. Also, the artistic director of Serpentine Galleries, Hans Ulrich Obrist, speaks with the 2021 Frieze Artist Award recipient, Precious Okoyomon. And Korakrit Arunanondchai answers our questionnaire

Dossier: Remembering Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas’s ‘The Shop’  

‘It was a wild night. It was fucking fantastic.’ The Shop marked an important turning point in Emin and Lucas’s careers at a moment when London itself was on the cusp of transformation from a parochial art scene to today’s commercial powerhouse. frieze spoke with Hilton Als, Sadie Coles, Pauline Daly, Emin, Lucas, Gregor Muir and Cerith Wyn Evans for a brief history of what The Shop was and what it meant.

Interview: Precious Okoyomon and Hans Ulrich Obrist  

‘Everything goes back to love.’ After a major exhibition at Performance Space New York and installation at The Shed this past spring, the 2021 winner of the Frieze Artist Award, Precious Okoyomon, speaks with Hans Ulrich Obrist about poetry, plants and planning for a precarious future.

Also featuring    

frieze editor-in-chief Andrew Durbin profiles painter Alvaro Barrington, whose exhibitions at South London Gallery and Emalin, London, open later in the year. In 1,500 words, Annie Ernaux reflects on a brief love affair in Venice that prompted her to write her masterpiece, The Years (2008). Frieze co-founder Matthew Slotover discusses a project by Angus Fairhurst from the magazine’s inaugural issue and Isabel Waidner offers an alternative version of the 1990s, the decade that defined British contemporary art.

Columns: Art School

Jessica Loudis looks at Floating University Berlin, a laboratory for experiential learning in a rainwater retention basin; Ajay Kurian provides a progress report for Titus Kaphar’s Next Haven project in Conntecticut; Walter Scott offers a degree show ‘Bingo’; and Katharina Sieverding remembers her time as a student under Joseph Beuys on the occasion of his centennial. Also, Sean Burns convenes three art students – Carlos Anguera at Glasgow School of Art, Alisa Petrosova at Cooper Union, New York, and Leyla Yenirce at Fine Arts Academy Hamburg – to discuss the impact of COVID-19 on their studies.

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From this issue

The artist speaks to Hans Ulrich Obrist about poetry, plants and planning for a precarious future

Kaphar offers a vision of local arts education and mentorship in the shadow of the ivory tower

BY Ajay Kurian |

Korakrit Arunanondchai answers the frieze Questionnaire

BY Korakrit Arunanondchai |

A piratical project in Berlin re-imagines the space – and sustainability – for schools

BY Jessica Loudis |

A thirty-year-old memory, a one-night stand and an art exhibition featuring this newly translated piece by the prize-winning author

BY ​Annie Ernaux |

On the centenary of Beuys’s birth, his former student remembers what it was like to study under the iconoclastic artist

BY Katharina Sieverding |

Artist Walter Scott on what to look out for in art school

BY Walter Scott |

Ahead of a three-month project in the Rockaways, the London-based artist is thinking about home, time and community

BY Andrew Durbin AND Alvaro Barrington |

Isabel Waidner imagines a different version of the decade that gave us the yBas (and frieze magazine)

BY Isabel Waidner |

Founding editor Matthew Slotover on how a project by Angus Fairhurst poked fun at London’s emerging art world

BY Matthew Slotover |

Carlos Anguera Jover, Alisa Petrosova and Leyla Yenirce chat with Sean Burns about home studios, slowing down and the end of institutional power

Hilton Als, Sadie Coles, Pauline Daly, Emin, Lucas, Gregor Muir and Cerith Wyn Evans on the artists’ short-lived project space in Bethnal Green, London

At Mountains, Berlin, the Honduras-born-Florence-based artist explores the complex relationship between the origin and translations of indigenous knowledge

BY Carina Bukuts |

At Baltic Centre, Gateshead, the Lithuanian artist duo open their first UK institutional solo with a quasi-operating room featuring a giant mechanical doctor

BY Alice Bucknell |

At her first institutional solo exhibition in Sweden at Moderna Museet, the artist’s sculptures reference Marcel Duchamp and evocations of pleasure and knowledge

BY Matthew Rana |

At Almine Rech, ‘Country Western’, the artist’s first solo show in the UK, draws on the unashamed iconography surrounding fame

BY Cal Revely-Calder |

At CRAC Alsace, the artist’s site-specific video installation envisages the collapse of the EU, exploring murky tax systems and the processes of alienation

BY Oriane Durand |

At Oslo's Fotogalleriet, the artist explores how the motions of avatars influence the movement of our bodies

BY Timotheus Vermeulen |

At the New Museum, the exhibition, conceived by the late curator Okwui Enwezor, is a sobering look at the realities of Black grief, but fails to address its root cause

BY Simon Wu |

Curated by Ekow Eshun, an exhibition of work by 11 Black artists at Lisson Gallery traces colonial histories alongside collective healing practices

BY Aida Amoako |

At Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, the Brazilian painter uses geometric abstraction as a tool for engaging with endangered ecosystems

BY Tomas Weber |

At Damien & The Love Guru, Brussels, the artist's photographs and texts put colonial histories in perspective with the rise of nationalism in Europe

BY Emile Rubino |

At Kunsthalle Basel, the artists peculiar designs and polished surfaces speak to the violence against bodies 

BY Kito Nedo |

‘Can you hear my voice?’ at Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne, asks what it means to claim agency amidst sectarian conflict

BY Shaad D’Souza |

At STPI, Singapore, the artist's solo exhibition wryly investigates the systems and structures of power 

BY Wong Binghao |

At David Lewis, New York, a presentation of the artist’s recent paintings and drawings reveals his continued obsession with sexual imagery and socialist Cuba

BY Terence Trouillot |

At Luma Westbau, Zurich, the artist-run imprint's first institutional exhibition envisions theory as a means of community-building

BY Olamiju Fajemisin |

At The Drawing Center, New York, the artist presents a site-specific installation of large-scale drawings showcasing the bodily contortions of her crass cartoon counterpart, Fatebe

BY Anthony Hawley |

At Cob Gallery, London, the artist takes the seemingly innocuous setting of a children’s tea party to explore how white British culture perceives race

BY Leanne Petersen |

At Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York, the late artist’s drawings and sculptures celebrate the spirit and history of southern Black communities

BY Saim Demircan |

At the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, a retrospective of the artist’s prominent career highlights her ingenuity across various mediums

BY Logan Lockner |

A group show at Aargauer Kunsthaus demonstrates that the late Swiss researcher’s interest in alternative knowledge strikes a chord with a new generation of artists

BY Chloe Stead |

At Galeria Arsenal, Bialystok, the artist deploys the strategies of reappropriation and upcycling to reflect on the history and present of the Roma community in Poland

BY Krzysztof Kościuczuk |

At Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, the artist presents a series of paintings, drawings and collages that capture the physical and mental endurance of confinement

BY Ela Bittencourt |

At Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square in Ontario, the artist combines threads of illness, vulnerability, healing and love in textiles centered on the queer Black body 

BY Charlene K. Lau |

Remembering the photographer’s invaluable contribution to the history of queer aesthetics

BY Che Gossett |