At Frieze New York, artists share the songs shaping their work. For Elephant, Focus curator Lumi Tan reveals a chorus of distinct practices.
As curator of Frieze New York’s Focus section since 2024, I am consistently asked about the themes that bring these eleven galleries together — my answer is always some version of “their difference.” The joy of curating the section is to listen to and platform heterodox international perspectives; it would be troubling to have galleries and artists from cities around the world, and from vastly different generations and lived experiences, feel overly aligned. The Focus section’s title signals a distinctive experience from the main fair — it is not only a space that platforms younger galleries, but the requirement for a solo presentation allows for a deeper understanding of each artist’s practice. Stone Island’s long-time support of the Focus section across Frieze’s international fairs crucially relieves financial pressure, so that galleries can take risks with more complex, often less commercial installations in order to engage curators and collectors seeing artists’ work for the first time. For Elephant, we asked each artist to send a song that has recently inspired them in the studio as they prepared for Frieze New York — what resulted was a revelatory range of eras, styles, and perspectives reflecting a shared conviction that this moment, and their work, is constant negotiation with the political and cultural reflections of the past.
Campeche from Mexico City, participates in Frieze New York for the first time, bringing the work of Abraham González Pacheco, an artist, set designer, and draftsman based in Tepoztlán. Pacheco imagines archaeological fictions through large-format drawings and concrete wall works marked with graphite and natural pigments; for Frieze, these will be hung on walls saturated in a chromatic gradient derived from pigments associated with colonial Mexican religious architecture. His work is inspired by the absence of historical archives in his hometown of San Simón el Alto, and so his song selection — Mexica (2020) by Los Cogelones— a punk band of four brothers who perform in traditional Aztec outfits, incorporate indigenous instruments, and sing in Spanish and Nahuatl — aligns with his work’s material and imagistic collapse of historical and cultural references.
EUROPA, also participating for the first time, presents Aki Goto, an artist and musician based in upstate New York. Goto’s iPhone videos focus on the everyday lives of her children, which she edits and scores with her own electronic music, transforming ordinary moments into surreal juxtapositions— an effect exaggerated when her video screens integrated into large-scale installations using salvaged furniture. For Frieze, she presents a new video shown on dental chairs and equipment, in which the alignment of her children’s teeth becomes a metaphor for the bittersweet experience of watching their commonalities and distinctions as they grow. Her song is a preview of the video’s soundtrack.
Champ LaCombe from Biarritz presents Catalan artist Antoni Miralda. The presentation focuses on works from 1984–86, when Miralda lived in New York, and founded El Internacional a legendary art-restaurant frequented by the era’s celebrated downtown artists, musicians, writers, and film figures. Also featured is The Honeymoon Project, a decades-long transatlantic series which stage symbolic marriage between the Statue of Liberty and Barcelona’s Columbus monument through joyous processions that simultaneous satirized conquest and the conventions of cultural exchange. Miralda returns to New York at Frieze as a prescient and influential figure — a blueprint for our contemporary, more corporatized desires for experiential events blurring art, performance, food, and pop culture. His song selection, Antonio Machín’s Angelitos Negros (1940), is poignant: the lyrics of this hugely popular Cuban-Spanish singer plead with a painter to include a Black angel in his depiction of heaven.
Isla Flotante from Buenos Aires, another first-time participant, presents Rosario Zorraquín, based in New York. Shaped by concepts from shamanism, psychoanalysis, and ritual, she developed her Glosario — a self-generated system of symbols — which appear through drawing, painting, and imprinting onto transparent filtering fabrics stretched in frames and arranged so that movement and light shape perception, the symbols shifting in legibility as they overlap. Her song choice reflects the interiority of her influences; Charly García’s Ojos de Video Tape (1983), is a melancholy and perpetually relevant meditation on experiencing the world through the mediation of a screen by the legendary Argentine musician.
Sargent’s Daughters from New York presents Yeni Mao, a Chinese-American artist based in Mexico City. His installations bring together small sculptures of steel, ceramic, and leather — made using techniques drawn from foundry and architectural trades — into spatially complex arrangements that suggest fragmented bodies caught in suspension, inferring personal mythologies rooted in questions of the definitions of individual identity within overwhelming systems. His song choice, Fela Kuti’s Zombie (1973), can be read as highly relevant— it is a relentless anthem whose lyrics are ever-changing commands, commenting on those who follow orders without thinking for themselves.
Public from London presents Reika Takebayashi, a painter and ceramicist based in Kyoto. Rather than drawing from her local landscape, she was deeply shaped by a residency in Finland, where exposure to Northern Europe’s post-glacial terrain led her to speculate on and formally and materially abstract a collective ecological past. For Frieze, an installation of paintings and ceramics offers different perspectives on this constant yet imperceptible change in the landscape, using layering and soft color to invite meditations on geological time. This mediation on how the landscape shapes time is echoed in her song choice — The Grey Funnel Line (1976) by British duo Silly Sisters (Maddy Prior and June Tabor) — is a cover of an earlier folk song about a sailor deep at sea, staring out into the expanse and chugging through repetitive tasks while longing for a lover.
