After a Year of Online Programming, What Worked?
Frieze editors discuss the different trends in digital exhibition-making, from end-of-world scenarios to community-based initiatives
Terence Trouillot In February, an exhibition titled ‘Goodbye, World’, curated by Andreas Templin and Raimar Stange, was installed on an ice floe near the Arctic Circle in Swedish Lapland. Centred on environmental disaster, the show – featuring works by Jonathan Monk, Olaf Nicolai and Martha Rosler, among others – made me think of how COVID-19 has prompted a focus in the arts on the cataclysmic end of civilization. Accessible exclusively online, the exhibition is both tongue-in-cheek and allegorical, suggesting that all artworks will cease to exist in the future.
ArtReview
Gelare Khoshgozaran ‘Medina Wasl: Connecting Town’ (still), 2018, 16mm film transferred to video, sound, colour, 31 min
The Los Angeles-based Iranian filmmaker opens up a brave new world of contemporary storytelling
In late October last year, a neon-yellow envelope came through my letterbox. Inside was a thick black card embossed with the sentence, ‘The gradients of fascism are diverse in their predictable dullness’. On the other side was a business-card-size USB drive, printed with a patchy green pattern of what might be an ivy-covered wall, punctuated by a figure covering their face with a black-and-white mask printed with the features of director Pier Paolo Pasolini. The sentence and the image both appear in the nine-minute film contained on the drive,
The Art of Queer Support in 2020
This year has shown many of us the importance of community-building, but for queer artists it isn’t just about mirroring an existing public sphere
In June 2020, London’s Cell Project Space posted hundreds of fluorescent-yellow envelopes to addresses in the UK and abroad. Each contained a photocopy of a handwritten letter that described the feeling of being drenched by ‘the waterfall of the world’, plus a vial housing a scent recalling the smell of sweat, mould and damp. For recipients outside the UK, the vial had been removed by the fictitious ‘International Customs and Border Protection’, but droplets remained, leaking onto a slip saying ‘OBJECT REMOVED’, subtly subverting the ‘system that may have otherwise prevented its safe journey’, as curator Eliel Jones observed.