We’ve been spotting various galleries who are singularly representing their city at Frieze London, with a cluster of spaces in Frieze Focus and Live from Cairo, Taipei and Guatemala City.
Guatemala’s Proyectos Ultravioleta are showing a dual exhibit of work from Vivian Suter and Elisabeth Wild — who happen to be mother and daughter. Wild was born in 1922 in Vienna, while daughter, Suter was born in Buenos Aires in the late 40s. The pair now live and work together in a home and studio off Lake Atitlan, which sits between three volcanos in the gallery’s home country. Led by Suter, they have worked together in this space for the last 35 years and their work has an interesting play one to another, having many harmonious elements yet not instantly appearing to be connected.
For Frieze Focus, Suter’s long canvases hang loosely at an angle mid-booth, linking with their rather wild creation — she leaves them outside after painting to take on the elements. Wild’s small-scale, framed collage works fill the two perpendicular walls of the booth, and are a response to the scaling down of her practice following a reduction in physical mobility in recent years. The artist uses magazine pages in her collages, creating structured works which are at times architectural, and at others mechanical in feel.
Another Focus booth comes from Taipei’s Chi-Wen Gallery, with three tv screens isolated on a large black wall, showing works by Yin-Ju Chen. The political films address moments of state violence, and blur the line between science and pseudo science, pulling the two together rather than presenting them as opposing modes of enquiry. The stark, black and white 3 channel films are visually luscious, showing moments of violent oppression alongside clinical dissections and ambiguous close ups of the human body.
Showing within the Focus section but as part of Frieze’s Live programming, Cairo’s Gypsum Gallery are presenting Mahmoud Khaled, with Untitled (Go-go Dancing Platform) Speaks, 2016 daily at 4.15pm. The artist poses the (most definitely unanswerable) question: What is the ‘new art’ of today? and takes inspiration from a 1991 Felix Gonzalez-Torres work — linking back with the 90s throwback section of this year’s Frieze — Untitled (Go-go Dancing Platform). Taking his queue from the original, whereby a dancer in silver lamé shorts would dance to music in his earphones for five minutes, Khaled’s performer has the same appearance, but he navigates the performance space without dancing, instead considering “his own existence as an art object demanding a new form of art.” Over a voice amplifier, the performer reads aloud the discussions between the artist and others, about the role of art at this moment.
Frieze London runs until 9 October at Regent’s Park, London
