Frieze Week London 2025

THE SON OF MAN, 1964

RENÉ MAGRITTE

OIL ON CANVAS

Welcome to Frieze London. After last year’s energizing redesign, I’m delighted to present one of the most international editions of our flagship fair ever. Frieze London, like the city itself, is a convening of today’s most exciting artistic minds, a snapshot of what the global art world is thinking and producing right now. is year’s edition is more global than ever, with new galleries joining us from Tunisia, Japan and Brazil, reflecting the ever-expanding scope of the art world.

Focus, our section dedicated to young galleries and emerging artists, gathers an extraordinary cohort of talents shaping the discourse around contemporary art. Supported by Stone Island, the section once again welcomes some of the most interesting young spaces from around the world, including newcomers Kayokoyuki (Tokyo), Eli Kerr (Montreal), King’s Leap (New York) and London’s a. SQUIRE.

e spirit of community continues to be a driving force for the fair. Artist-to-Artist returns for a third year, with six solo presentations by new voices, chosen by some of the most renowned practitioners in contemporary art. Supported by O cial Partner Ti any & Co., the section presents a multi-generational community, from Mumbai to Mexico City. e spirit of convening extends to this year’s curated section, led by Dr Jareh Das, who is based between London and West Africa. Titled Echoes in the Present, it sees galleries from Angola, Brazil, Senegal, the UK and the US in an exploration of the ties between Africa, Latin America and their diasporas. Its eight presentations rea rm Frieze London’s commitment to research, critical discussion and new positions, and building a global community.

Supporting our galleries and the artists they represent is of huge importance to me. is year, alongside Frieze London’s five returning acquisition funds and prizes, I’m delighted to announce the new Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation Prize, awarded to artists working in unconventional formats and the galleries that exhibit them.

e winner of the Frieze Artist Award 2025 is the London-based Qatari American Sophia Al-Maria, who presented a performance at the fair back in 2014 and returns an internationally lauded artist. Her commission marks a bold new direction in her practice, as she stages a live comedy club within the fair. Elsewhere, the Frieze x Deutsche Bank Emerging Curators Fellowship continues into 2025–26, and I’m pleased to include projects by recent fellows Sophia Harari and Amrit Sanghera.

During Frieze Week, you’ll see how London’s art ecosystem continues to thrive, with galleries from Maureen Paley, Modern Art and Sadie Coles HQ to Rose Easton expanding their footprints, alongside the inauguration of new initiatives such as Yan Du Projects and Ibraaz.

ere is always too much happening in London to mention in one go. Look out for me this Frieze Week and I’ll tell you about the rest.

Eva Langret Director, Frieze EMEA

‘What’s nice? Only a boring cliché.’ So says Jane Horrocks in one of my favourite London-set films, Mike Leigh’s Life Is Sweet (1990). Right now, it can be hard to see where the nice, the good and the beautiful have their place. But art and creativity, the way that free expression can spark moments of joy and understanding between people, is always to be celebrated.

More than 280 galleries from across all continents are participating in Frieze London and Frieze Masters this year. You can see a wealth of Indian art (p.30), discover emerging Korean artists (p.32) or consider the creative dialogue between West Africa and Brazil (p.16). Even the fair’s London-based artists (p.38) hail from Canada, Italy, Tanzania

The city’s diversity is beautifully conveyed in the Frieze Week cover commission by rising British-Bengali artist Mohammed Z. Rahman. In a series of ‘confections’ painted on matchboxes, Rahman catalogues the range of treats consumed by east London communities –handesh, berries, mochi and ice lollies. A hymn to the different cultures that feast in and feed this city. And a reminder that, if we will it, life can still be sweet.

Matthew McLean, Editor, Frieze

Week

42 Books The city’s best independent shops

46 Collector Profile Mariana Teixeira de Carvalho

54 Strong Foundations

The impact of new art initiatives in London

56 Double Trouble A visual commission inspired by Tunga

62 Five to See

64 Mona Hatoum on Giacometti

66 All Eyes on Central Asia

The region steps into the spotlight

68 Life Is Sweet

Mohammed Z. Rahman

As winner of the 2025 Frieze London Artist Award, the London-based, Qatari-American artist Sophia Al-Maria’s interest in language, codes and narrative has led her to a bold move: staging live stand-up comedy on-site at the fair. Jesi Khadivi is ready to be tickled

SERIOUSLY FUNNY

In Trickster Makes This World (1998), the writer Lewis Hyde argues that many cultural traditions view the trickster figure as the inventor of language. This might be through a multiplication of voices that supplant a single primal tongue, or by the creation of forms of ‘inner writing’ that assert self-knowledge in the face of dominant narratives. ‘What tricksters do quite regularly,’ he writes, ‘is create lively talk where there has been silence, or where speech has been prohibited.’

Hyde’s insight resonates with the work of 2025 Frieze London Artist Award winner Sophia Al-Maria, whose expansive practice spans filmmaking, writing, sound and more traditional media such as drawing, collage and sculpture. A fascination with ruins, non-linear temporality

and speculative histories runs throughout her works, propelled by a sustained inquiry into the elasticity of language. She examines the weight of what can be said, while finding pathways through diverse visual, narrative and performative forms, in order to summon, but not contain, that which evades capture.

‘You can use [words] in all kinds of ways,’ Al-Maria said in an interview in 2021, published in Afterall, ‘to seduce someone, to heal someone, but also to start or end a war.’

The Qatari-American artist first garnered public attention more than a decade ago for her fluid theorization of what she calls ‘Gulf Futurism’. Coined with fellow artist Fatima Al Qadiri, the term grapples with the hyper-charged modernization of the Arabian Gulf

region. This compressed period, as AlMaria puts it, saw ‘one of the most ancient ways of living [come] head-on against extreme wealth and capitalism – glass and steel against wool and camels’. Al-Maria’s narrative practice, whether in film, performance or on the page, utilizes storytelling that embraces multiplicity rather than a single, linear narrative. This ‘carrier bag’ approach is inspired by sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who, drawing on the paleoanthropological argument that humanity’s first tool is not a weapon, but a bag for moving things from place to place, posits storytelling less as a ‘hunt’ with a beginning, middle and end and more as a ‘meandering sweep’ or ‘gathering’.

This philosophy of elliptical storytelling manifests vividly in Al-Maria’s films. Works like Beast Type Song (2019), Tender

Point Ruin (2021) and Tiger Strike Red (2022) blend science fiction, poetic narration, found footage and live performance to probe notions of apocalypse, historiography, trauma, subjectivity and otherness. In Beast Type Song , for instance, multiple narrators, including recordings of Etel Adnan and Derek Jarman, convey a world of political, social and ecological entanglements, suggesting that when words fail, movement, drawing and sound provide new means of expression.

Such preoccupations with language and communication – its excesses, absences, ruptures and overflows – have also been a throughline in Al-Maria’s public and performative projects.

An earlier intervention at Frieze Projects in 2014 revealed subliminal messages

scattered throughout the fair and incorporated a dystopian sci-fi video addressing climate change and accelerated consumerism, with the monitor pushed around the fair on a trolley by two performers.

In 2020, the Serpentine commissioned Taraxos, a pop-up stage conceived as a platform for visitors to Kensington Gardens to engage in deep listening. Al-Maria’s sculptural installation operated as a conceptual foil to nearby Speakers’ Corner – an historic site for public speeches and debates. Slim metal poles reached towards the sky, crowned by geometric forms recalling sundials, dandelions or asterisks – a punctuation mark that the artist considers a graphic representation of the inexpressible. In keeping with Al-Maria’s

sci-fi sensibility, these futuristic totems, moved by the wind, resemble crude communication devices linking parkgoers to another dimension.

The artist’s recent work We Slip and Sway Away (2025), a collaboration with the musician Davia Spain commissioned by the Aspen Art Museum for this year’s inaugural AIR festival, is marked by a similar interest in creating space.

The sonic work, described on the museum's website as ‘part séance, part song-cycle, part science-fictional lament’, takes as its point of departure theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker’s Life as No One Knows It (2024), which imagines existence not as a fixed biological category but as an emergent system of signals and structures.

Commissioned as part of the Frieze London Artist Award, Al-Maria’s

An editioned work by Sophia Al-Maria extends the life of the performance beyond the booth and into your collection. All proceeds will be donated to Micro Rainbow, a London-based charity supporting LGBTQI+ asylum seekers and refugees with housing, training and the possibility of a liveable future. A reversal of fortune is always possible, even if improbable.

Please visit frieze.com for more details.

performance, Wall-Based Work (2025), exemplifies the fair’s role in providing early- and mid-career artists with space to experiment with ambitious ideas and, in Al-Maria’s case, make audiences part of the work itself. Adopting the format of a ‘drop down’ stand-up club inside the Frieze London tent, Wall-Based Work deploys comedy to explore subjects from Brexit to art-world lesbian clowning, from freeports to trauma bonding and white mommy issues. Although her public talks and writing are often riddled with wit and humour, Al-Maria’s previous works have never explicitly engaged the rituals and frameworks of stand-up comedy. Yet, if we follow Hyde’s notion of the trickster figure as one who multiplies voices or, as Donna Haraway writes in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991),

as one who turns ‘a stacked deck into a potent set of wild cards for refiguring possible worlds’, then seeds from these earlier works begin to germinate in Al-Maria’s new commission. Humour, after all, not only has the potential to expose raw, unedited emotion, but it offers an inchoate, liberatory space to engage socially repressed or unspeakable topics. ‘A thing is funny,’ George Orwell wrote in his 1945 essay ‘Funny, but not Vulgar’, ‘when – in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening – it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution.’

Coinciding with a major survey of Nigerian modernism at Tate Modern, this year’s Frieze London curated section, Echoes in the Present, explores the global journeys of West African art

THERE AND BACK AGAIN

The influence of West African art on Brazil – a consequence of the transatlantic slave trade – may well be an enduring one. Yet the force of its impact remained unacknowledged for some time, only becoming a point of enquiry in the 20th century. In the 1930s, two iterations of an Afro-Brazilian Congress allowed academics to convene in the Brazilian cities of Recife and then Salvador, to discuss – and ultimately validate –the cultural footprint of the country’s African heritage. Some three decades later, when the First World Festival of Negro Arts took place in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966 – a headline-grabbing event that sought to promote Pan-Africanism – Afro-Brazilian artists were invited to display their work, which was by then considered a national asset. And when Festac (Second Festival of Black Arts and Culture) was held in Lagos in 1977, Brazil even staged an exhibition titled ‘The Impact of African Culture on Brazil’, which included sculptures, paintings, drawings and engravings by 13 contemporary artists.

Regardless of these political displays of affinity (and without touching on the motivations behind them), artists in Brazil and West Africa have invariably been alert to the artistic kinship between the two regions, leading to artworks that share themes, materials and motifs –from an abundance of clay and textiles, and patterns extracted from symbology, to a contemplation of ancestral traditions. ‘Echoes in the Present’, a new curated

section at this year’s Frieze London, highlights this correlation through the work of ten artists who hail from Benin, Dakar, Lagos, Luanda, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and São Paulo. ‘For me, this connection has always felt personal, even if I didn’t engage with it directly at first,’ explains Jareh Das, the section’s curator. ‘Growing up in Lagos in the 1990s, the presence of the aguda – descendants of formerly enslaved Yoruba people who returned from Brazil to Nigeria – was simply part of the city’s fabric.’ Although Das does not belong to this Indigenous group, she was mindful that ‘these histories were around me, and that early awareness shaped my interest in how artists from both regions explore cultural lineages in their work.’

The artists being exhibited as part of ‘Echoes in the Present’ have responded to the West Africa-Brazil connection in differing ways. Water is a recurring motif in Aline Motta’s work, linked to Congo-Angolan cosmologies, in which it represents a boundary between the living and the dead. Naomi Lulendo considers Creole culture through totemic sculptures made of metal and basketwork, which reference the decorated wooden pole at the centre of a voodoo temple thought to mediate between the material and spiritual realms. Focusing on the body, Bunmi Agusto is known for her fantastical protagonists that are part human, part spirit. Her ‘Hybrid’ paintings (2020) are based on a self-fashioned piece of folklore according to which each character

is born from DNA belonging to the artist, as well as Obatala, the Yoruba deity, revered as the creator of the world. Tadáskía also foregrounds the context in which she creates her multimedia works. The photo series ‘Familiar Constellations’ (2018) documents her Afro-Guarani origins through images that reflect on family, memory and land. Alberto Pitta, a master of textile printing and serigraphy, who has been working for over 40 years, is the eldest artist here. Across his vibrant cloth compositions are repeated signs and shapes that stem from Yoruba and Candomblé mythology – a strong presence in Salvador and the Recôncavo Baiano.

Afro-Brazilian art histories are also a focal point at Frieze Masters this year. Abdias do Nascimento, a distinguished figure who was nominated for the second time for the Nobel Peace Prize a year before his death in 2011 at the age of 97, is the subject of a presentation by São Paulo’s Galeria MaPa, which includes the early landmark Oricha’s Mother (Mother Nature) (1971) – a symbolic painting that accentuates the figure of a white woman whose womb contains sea creatures and water that surrounds a Black man’s face. Following Do Nascimento’s creation of the Black Experimental Theater in Rio in 1944 and the foundations for what would become the Black Arts Museum in 1950, the self-taught artist embarked on his first series of geometric paintings in 1968 – the year he fled Brazil’s dictatorship and moved to New York. He flourished in America, mounting solo

exhibitions at the Harlem Art Gallery, Yale School of Art and Architecture, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 1975, Do Nascimento declared, ‘I am merely a painter of Black art’. While in 1989, he elaborated further explaining, ‘What is important to me are Afro-Brazilian myths, religious history, legends.’ Outside of the fair, art from West Africa takes centre stage in an all-encompassing exhibition at Tate Modern that outlines the development of Modern art in Nigeria. Including more than 250 works by over 50 artists, ‘Nigerian Modernism’ is the first show in the UK to examine this history. It features an international network of trailblazing figures, such as Uzo Egonu, Ben Enwonwu, Ladi Kwali and Aina Onabolu. Many of these artists trained in Britain and adopted European techniques while reclaiming their own Indigenous traditions, at the same time as taking note of Europe’s growing fascination with historical African art. Charting intertwined histories and influences, displacements and conjunctions, ‘Echoes in the Present’ and ‘Nigerian Modernism’ capture the interrelated sources from which artists draw: as broad as the Atlantic itself.

CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS TASHKENT

Frieze London and Frieze Masters are nearly as stuff ed with great dining as they are with great art. Here’s what’s cooking at the fairs, from Jikoni to Trullo via Nobu and more. Illustration by Carolina Moscoso

ON THE MENU

Nobu

London was the fi rst European city in which the acclaimed Nobu opened shop, with branches in Mayfair and Marylebone. Chef Nobu Matsuhisa’s menu draws on Japanese cuisine with innovative flavours from South America. A restful space studded with ikebana arrangements, it’s the perfect spot for an invigorating lunch, or an afternoon sake.

Iconic dish: e wonderfully rich, sweet and savoury black cod miso

For fans of: Barbara Hepworth (bold, earthy and precise)

Find it at: Frieze Masters

Ham Yard

Like the oasis of calm it o ers amid the bustle of Soho, Ham Yard brings its quiet elegance to e Regent’s Park, providing respite for weary feet and hungry appetites. At lunch, enjoy modern European cuisine cooked with fi nesse, or return mid-afternoon for a restorative cup of tea and a slice of something sweet.

Iconic dish: Beetroot and pomegranate salad followed by beef tartare

For fans of: Gerhard Richter (reliable European class)

Find it at: Frieze Masters

Trullo

Having celebrated its 15th birthday this summer, the north London institution continues to deliver the very best of classic Italian cooking to diehard fans and new converts alike. Everything is made with the fi nest fresh ingredients and many people rate its pasta the best in town.

Iconic dish: e by-now-legendary pappardelle with beef-shin ragù

For fans of: Bridget Riley (simple, e ective and sophisticated)

Find it at: Frieze Masters

Gail’s

You know your neighbourhood is on the up when a Gail’s lands on the local high street. Its reliably satisfying soups, salads and sandwiches, top-notch co ee and fresh pastries hit the spot for those in need of a quick refuel. A good opportunity for a little o -booth chat with some of the exhibitors you are sure to encounter in the queue.

Iconic dish: A perfectly baked cinnamon bun with a flat white

For fans of: Richard Long (timeless nourishment)

Find it at: Frieze Masters and Frieze London

Jikoni

With the tagline ‘No Borders Kitchen’ Jikoni marries flavours from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the UK. As well as having an impressive commitment to the environment – in 2021 it was the fi rst independent restaurant in the UK to achieve carbon-neutral status – Jikoni brings an original and healthy vegetarian menu to Frieze.

Iconic dish: Squash pakoras

For fans of: Sheila Hicks (bold, ambitious energy)

Find it at: Frieze London

Maison François

A favourite for gallery dinners, Maison François transports a soupçon of old-world Gallic charm from the heart of St James’s and spoils diners with its impeccable French classics, whether that’s a simple plate of charcuterie, a fresh salad, or roast chicken and frites. Just make sure to save room for the delights of the dessert trolley

Iconic dish: A rich and refi ned chocolate eclair

For fans of: Sophie Calle (quintessentially French)

Find it at: Frieze London

Sessions Art Club

Pull up a chair and enjoy some sharing plates at this chic eatery. Diners at its Clerkenwell basecamp can feast their eyes on a revolving presentation of art on the walls, with recent o erings from Rene Matić and Melike Kara. And they can fi ll their bellies with chef Alice Hill’s skilfully prepared dishes that draw on influences from across Europe, all prepared with seasonal produce from land and sea and accompanied by a refi ned selection of wines.

Iconic dish: Langoustine risotto and fennel

For fans of: Agnes Martin (understated brilliance)

Find it at: Frieze London

Rita’s

Returning to Frieze for the sixth year, this time around Rita’s takes the form of a taco bar. e ever-popular Soho restaurant – where Harry Styles and Zoë Kravitz were recently spotted on a date – will be serving up fresh gluten-free tacos and generously fi lled hot subs, for those on the go. Wash it all down with a fresh juice or a delicious cocktail, before diving back in.

Iconic dish: Tacos, of course.

For fans of: Isa Genzken (a flavour bomb that hits the spot every time)

Find it at: Frieze London

Bao

Ten years old, with branches across London, this Taiwanese eatery continues to pull in the crowds for its delicious take on street food. Sourcing the best ingredients, with beef and seafood from Cornwall, and without a trace of MSG in sight, get your umami fi x and enjoy one of its ‘mood-matching’ cocktails.

Iconic dish: Classic braised pork belly bao

For fans of: David Hammons (perennially popular, never fails)

Find it at: Frieze London

Feeling thirsty? If you are at Frieze London, swing by east London social enterprise Company Drinks for a fruit cordial, a BAD Cola or, if you need something a little stronger, a foraged cocktail. For a glass of wine, stop o at Yalumba, a 175-year-old family business from Australia making exceptional, sustainably produced wines. Or slow down, take a break and sip a rejuvenating matcha at Sayuri, Frieze’s resident tea experts.

Re-imagining Central London

Designed by Foster + Partners, Principal Tower is the epitome of understated elegance offering incredible views over the city of London.

W1 Place is a collection of 36 one, two and three-bedroom luxury residences. A place to call home, in an unparalleled location.

Marylebone Square is a collection of 54 elegantly appointed apartments, carefully curated boutiques and restaurants; located in the heart of Marylebone Village. principaltower.com | w1.place | marylebonesquare.com

Contact Concord London for further information: +44 (0)20 3598 8888 | info@concord-london.com | www.concord-london.com

Origin Stories

In the Deutsche Bank Lounges, Noémie Goudal Explores the Deep Foundations of Life

Noémie Goudal’s work is spellbinding. Stand before one of her photographs, videos, sculptures or performances and you’re instantly mesmerized – transported to an otherworldly terrain. Yet, unlike most illusionists, Goudal is generous with her secrets. She pulls back the curtain, revealing the strings and scaffolding behind the mirage: the paper that forms her sets, the mechanisms that animate them, the scientific findings that underpin her thinking. In fact, since the early 2010s, her practice has been grounded in paleoclimatology – the study of ancient climates and geological strata.

Perhaps the most magical aspect of Goudal’s work is her ability to photograph what once was – to conjure visions of a world that predates not only the invention of photography but human existence itself. Her work asks how we might visualize deep time. Goudal gives us the fantasy of witnessing what no human has ever witnessed. What we see, how we see and what we project sits at the heart of her work. The moving-image piece Rocks (2024), on show at Edel Assanti this autumn, uses optical illusion as a visual metaphor for our flawed perception of permanence in nature. What appears

fixed is, in fact, precarious. And yet, as with all her works, this apparition is not meant to deceive – it’s there to deepen our understanding. Goudal’s rooting of her work in scientific inquiry extends beyond mere aesthetics. She translates geological data into images and immersive installations, rendering accessible ideas and landscapes that most of us might never otherwise encounter. This autumn, London will be shaped by Goudal’s distinctive ‘magic-scientific’ practice. Her work will be on view at the Deutsche Bank lounges at both Frieze London and Frieze Masters and at Edel Assanti gallery, where she will show the new photographic series, ‘Delta’ (2025).

Born in Paris in 1984, Goudal moved to London to study graphic design at Central Saint Martins, before completing an MA in photography at the Royal College of Art. Since then, her work has been exhibited at major institutions including the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern and The Photographers’ Gallery. In 2024, she was shortlisted for the prestigious Marcel Duchamp Prize, France’s equivalent to the Turner Prize.

In his 2009 book Ecology without Nature, philosopher Timothy Morton writes, ‘It is in art that the fantasies we have about nature take shape – and dissolve.’ Morton suggests that artistic representation both creates and destabilizes our understanding of nature – whether as a pristine wilderness or an idealized landscape. Goudal’s work operates in exactly this terrain. When we picture terms like ‘forest’, ‘iceberg’ or ‘grotto’, we summon visual memories shaped by images and direct experience. But what of the geological events that occurred long before such landscapes existed?

Goudal’s work explores this deep history of the Earth – studying, interpreting and narrating events that predate human life and disturbance. Long before the Anthropocene – the era defined by human impact on the planet’s ecosystems and geology – Earth was already writing its own layered story. While the naming of our current epoch remains subject to debate – with terms like Capitalocene, Plantationocene and Chthulucene all

vying for attention – there is a consensus that we now inhabit a post-industrial, extractive age. This period is rewriting the Earth’s systems and, crucially for Goudal, its geological strata.

The presentation across the Deutsche Bank Lounges at Frieze London and Frieze Masters is titled ‘Inhale Exhale’ – a title borrowed from her own video work of 2021 and a neon, on show at the fair, from 2022 – and includes works from 2013 to now. An installation created for the corridor of the lounge at Frieze London is a striking example of the research at the core of her practice. Steel panels line the walls, each bearing intricate sequences of small, printed images drawn from diverse disciplines. One might imagine these as akin to fossils – impressions and remnants of extinct life embedded in the material. These traces are clues for understanding Goudal’s artistic method.

Inside the lounge stands Terrella (2022), a work created in collaboration with a historian of science, consisting of 12 sculptures. Each one visualizes a different cosmological hypothesis about the Earth’s formation from antiquity to today. Figures such as Restoro d’Arezzo, Dante Alighieri, Jean Buridan, James Lovelock nd Isaac Newton – each a product of their era’s scientific knowledge and cultural imagination – offer competing origin stories. Through Goudal’s lens, these mostly male visions of the world’s beginnings are reanimated with theatricality and wonder. What is science, what is speculation; what is illusion, what is truth? In the end, we are left spellbound – enchanted by Goudal’s sleight of hand, and the seriousness of what it reveals.

Camille Henrot selected Ilana Harris-Babou in this year’s Artist-to-Artist section at Frieze London. At Henrot’s New York studio, the two discuss the pleasure of making art with their families

‘ART IS THE EXCUSE TO DO THINGS WITH PEOPLE I LOVE ’

MEKA BOYLE

Ilana, Camille selected you for this year’s Artist-to-Artist ; which work are you going to be showing at Frieze?

ILANA HARRIS-BABOU

A three-channel video inspired by advertising screens on the subway. It brings together footage that I’ve shot around New York City and Senegal, where my dad is from. I’m also showing ceramic mosaics on the walls that are inspired by the ones on the IRT subway line. The videos are also informed by these strange paintings that are in the subway at Sterling Street station.

MB Speaking of the subway, Camille, your new series is about etiquette.

CAMILLE HENROT

Yes, it’s called ‘Dos and Don’ts’. It’s about etiquette and it’s also about unsorted materials – the things you don’t really

know what to do with, like the documents that children bring home from school every day. This is a page from a book about horses I really loved as a child. And this is my child’s French lesson from the American school here. Then there are medical bills. I never know what to keep and where to keep it.

IHB Some things have a purpose while others are precious things from your childhood.

CH Exactly, so you end up with this miscellaneous pile of stuff which somehow becomes even more scary.

IHB But this is the scary stuff that you can work through in art.

CH Exactly! The scariest stuff is always good material. During the holiday, I was with my mother, and I was sifting through my first drawings. There are a lot of them and it was fascinating to see how

little my interests have shifted. I made a scrapbook which I titled ‘Books of Things’. Why create such a vague category? There were images of Greek philosophers and rare birds all mixed together.

IHB I would love to have met little Camille! Everything circles back round. I live a block from my childhood home, so this autumn I have been editing video in the same library where I did my homework when I was a kid; I make art in the same space; I ride the same subway line. Often, I’m retracing my footsteps, and so certain textures and colours come up again and again.

CH You also realize how your perception was much denser when you were a child.

When I was looking at my drawings, I remembered everything about the moment I did them. There was one from

my first day of school – I was around five – and I remember at some point another child scribbled on my drawing. I decided to integrate the scribble into the picture and it looked like a pattern on the person’s dress. I was really proud: it felt like such a victory.

IHB Are there parts of your work now that you want to keep private, just for yourself?

CH In the beginning, I only worked with film. All the while I was drawing, but I didn’t want people to see my drawings. They felt a little bit too revealing and intimate, also too crazy with subject matter that’s difficult to digest. So, for a long time, I kept them private. What would it be for you?

IHB There are so many conversations I have with people leading up to the work, things that I record on video with my

loved ones or moments that almost feel too good to include. They need to live for me as memories. In many ways, art is the framework or the excuse to do things with people I love in places that I love, and then maybe only about ten percent makes its way into the work.

CH I will also film hundreds of hours and the result is maybe two minutes long. For my new film, In the Veins, which is about caring for children in the context of a global climate crisis, I filmed my own children. And I’m glad I did, because now I have images of them that I probably wouldn’t have found time to make if it weren’t for the work. But it also makes me question my true motivation when starting a piece. It’s very hard to completely separate what you’re doing for your own pleasure from what you’re doing for it to become a work. The word ‘work’ itself

almost feels inappropriate when the material and the drive are so personal and connected with joy.

MB Ilana, your mother and other family members feature in your work: what is that process like?

IHB Ever since I started trying to make art, even when I was a kid, I would mostly focus on painting my relatives and family members and create a framework to spend time together in a way that I wouldn’t otherwise. I never really imagined working with an actor because, in a way, the camera is just a mediator for a conversation that I want to have anyway. I often work with my relatives because they’re the closest people to me that aren’t me. And they can maybe also put up with the weirdness of my way of working, which is often very improvisational. I love not having an end goal in sight.

When I begin my investigations, I bring all my evidence together and just see what happens. I put one image on top of another and let that guide the next decision and the next.

CH I can relate to that. I use an array of materials as a way of preventing myself from entering the project with a point of view that is too clear. I also like that you say ‘evidence’ and ‘investigating’ because I feel like that too. I love to display a lot of images and objects on a table, and then try to understand why I am interested in them and what connection they have. Sometimes I have to complete the work before I am able to verbalize anything about it. IHB I love not having to prove to somebody else that something is worth doing before I do it.

CH Do you have a dream project that you haven’t realized yet?

IHB I always have, yes. I would love to make a big, unwieldy video that I’m allowed to re-edit once a year, every year, for the rest of my life.

CH I’ve been trying to do that! For the film I’m making now, every year I film Times Square on New Year’s Eve and my children’s birthdays. I was hoping that I could create another iteration of the film each year. But the gallery and my producer put an end to that for practical reasons. I’d also love to design a swimming pool!

Artists reflect on their selections for Artist-to-Artist 2025

Nicole Eisenman on Katherine Hubbard

‘Katherine Hubbard’s and her mother’s bodies are reflected in a disarming, poignant funhouse of mirrors. Her mother is losing her memory, and together they are sorting through belongings, preparing to move out of this well-lived and -loved home. The images feel haunted: things are familiar yet disorienting. Katherine says, “How do you apply tense to a person who is in the process of becoming someone new?” She documents with terrifying accuracy what it feels like to lose oneself mentally. Then, with her body prints, Hubbard insists on the hereness of the self.’

Company Gallery, New York, presents Katherine Hubbard (AA2).

Abraham Cruzvillegas on Ana Segovia

‘Ana Segovia’s work represents the urgency and need of making art in the 21st century, enriching our toolboxes, widening perspectives and discourses, in search of new questions about the myth of identity and all its bizarre satellites, including nationalism.’

kurimanzutto, New York and Mexico City, presents Ana Segovia (AA5).

Chris Ofili on Neal Tait

‘Neal and I studied together at Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College of Art in the 1990s, sharing a studio for some of that time. Art school was a time of exploration, growth and often failure –essential for artistic development. Today’s landscape is vastly different, and I doubt I would have pursued art now due to the fear of debt, which stifles experimentation. I gained a unique insight into Neal’s complex and coded process of artmaking: his openness to taking the surreal as a starting point; how his musical authorship informs his visual expression; his understanding of paint-handling; his freedom of movement between the boundaries of figuration and abstraction; and his willingness to pursue the unknown and mysterious.’

Lungley Gallery, London, presents Neal Tait (AA1).

Amy Sherald on René Treviño

‘René Treviño has built a significant and consistent body of work over the course of his career, with numerous solo exhibitions that reflect both depth and evolution in his practice. I believe his work deserves the visibility and recognition that this platform provides, and I’m excited to advocate for a wider audience to engage with his thoughtful and resonant vision.’

Erin Cluley Gallery, Dallas, presents René Treviño (AA4).

Bharti Kher on T. Venkanna

‘T. Venkanna is an artist who isn’t afraid. He delves deep into the human psyche, into the body, into sexuality. Our needs, our fears, our identities are turned inside out; raw and vulnerable, we march towards the inevitability of life’s only promise to the universe. In his work, we meet South India: its thousands of years of temple sculpture and the erotic figures of Khajuraho. Amid the swirling change of India, Venkanna lays bare his distinct language of the body; his voice is his own.’ Gallery Maskara, Mumbai, presents T. Venkanna (AA6).

With a growing institutional attention to South Asian contemporary art across the UK, London is proving fertile ground for Indian galleries and their artists. By Charlotte Jansen

INDIAN SUMMER

For its sixth presentation at Frieze London, New Delhi-based Nature Morte presents ‘-scapes’, a group show of eight Indian and Indian diasporic artists, including Subodh Gupta, Reena Saini Kallat, Bharti Kher and Imran Qureshi. ‘A “scape” is a world unto itself and invites speculation about the extent to which one occupies, envisions and can build “scapes” of one’s own,’ says Nature Morte’s director, Aparajita Jain. Each artist will present ‘a “scape” that shares in seeing whole and part relationships. The artists have not only situated themselves within a “scape” of their own configuration but also ask us to consider our own.’ This includes works that contemplate cartography, but also conceptual ideas of multitude and multiplicity, such as new oil paintings by Raghav Babbar that observe people at the Maha Kumbh Mela, the world’s largest religious gathering held every 144 years in India, with the most recent taking place in 2025. Converging at this huge Hindu celebration, each figure brings their own world.

Nature Morte is part of a prominent presence of diverse Indian galleries at Frieze London and Frieze Masters this year, where it joins DAG, Experimenter, Gallery Maskara, Jhaveri Contemporary, Project 88, Shrine Empire and Vadehra Art Gallery. Jain maintains that London’s ‘vast network of collectors, curators, institutions and academics’ makes it an attractive location for Indian galleries to position their artists internationally. Furthermore, she has found a receptiveness in the UK to ‘India’s rich cultural history and rituals’, imparted to a local audience through more intricately woven and complex historical narratives.

For some Indian galleries, Frieze London provides a fertile testing ground upon which to challenge historical ideas and showcase the new. An array of recent exhibitions by contemporary Indian artists at major London institutions ranges from Arpita Singh’s solo exhibition at the Serpentine (her first at a UK institution) and a posthumous survey of Hamad Butt at the Whitechapel Gallery to solo projects with Permindar Kaur and Prem

Left Amol K Patil, Lines Between the City S4 2023. Courtesy: the artist and Project 88, Mumbai

Below Arpita Singh, The Tamarind Tree, 2022. Courtesy: the artist, Vadehra Family Collection and Serpentine Gallery, London

Opposite page Vikrant Bhise, Revolution unborn: Namdeo Dhasal (Dalit Panther), 2025. Courtesy: the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata and Mumbai

South Asian galleries at Frieze London: Experimenter, Kolkata and Mumbai (Stand B5); Project 88, Mumbai (B28); Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai (B24); Gallery Maskara, Mumbai (AA6); Nature Morte, Mumbai (A11); Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi (A20)

South Asian galleries at Frieze Masters: Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai (S11); Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi (G8).

Sagarika Sundaram: ‘Release’ is on view at Alison Jacques, London, until 15 November 2025.

Sahib at Pitzhanger Manor this year. Sagarika Sundaram, who has a show planned at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds in 2026, will make her UK solo debut at Alison Jacques gallery during Frieze, while ‘A Story of South Asian Art’, exploring Indian modernism, opens at the Royal Academy of Arts in London on 31 October. The show centres on the figure of the late Mrinalini Mukherjee, who will also be the subject of a major retrospective at The Hepworth Wakefield in 2026. These exhibitions have brought a new wave of attention to the breadth of Indian art practices from throughout the last century.

Sushma Jansari is the curator of the British Museum’s ‘Ancient India: Living Traditions’ (until 19 October). Through more than 180 objects, the exhibition traces a link from ancient devotional practices to contemporary faith communities, facilitated by work with Indian diasporic groups in the UK. According to Jansari, London is a unique meeting point for Indian culture, heritage and academia within Europe: ‘The huge diaspora community and sheer range of India-focused ancient and contemporary collections, artists, students, gallerists, curators, authors, cultural innovators all contribute to shaping a cultural scene that is ever-changing and draws an international crowd.’ She goes on to add that the long and intertwined history of artistic exchange between the UK and India also makes the cultural scene different to elsewhere: ‘Often it’s the juxtaposition of Indian and British South Asian art in eclectic spaces that sparks the imagination.’

Shanay Jhaveri, the Barbican’s head of visual arts, embodies the capital’s cross-cultural internationalism. He was the curator of last year’s groundbreaking ‘The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998’, which uncovered a period of history rarely explored in the West through the work of 30 Indian artists. Jhaveri was born and raised in Mumbai, studied at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and the Royal College of Art, London, and joined the Barbican from New York’s Metropolitan

Museum of Art in 2022. He notes the many international curators working in London ‘who have grown up elsewhere and built a practice on transnational ways’ and who work with what he calls a ‘bifocal sensibility’. This is contributing to a new generation reconsidering how Indian and South Asian arts are seen in the UK, filling in gaps in history and covering radical new ground. ‘At this moment, there is quite a plethora of practices on view,’ he says. ‘Institutions are rethinking national history, received global art history and how those intersect.’ These exhibitions also introduce other prisms through which to understand this past, not only defined by the embattled lens of colonialism and partition. Venues like the Barbican have previously followed specific trajectories of South Asian art, ‘We are seeing a shift,’ Jhaveri says, ‘but it has to be consistent – a refrain we can rely on – and not represented only through acquisitions, but also in the way work is displayed, exhibited and creates space for audiences. I hope that our approach will become seeded more broadly, so that everyone sees the value in it.’

Novera Ahmed (1939–2015), as part of the ‘Spotlight’ section, presenting ‘a menagerie of serpents, owls and other fantastical and mythical beasts’ crafted in bronze. Vadehra Art Gallery’s Roshini Vadehra agrees that there is an ‘increasing appetite’ for contemporary art from the Global South in London. ‘Institutions and collectors are closely engaging with art that has diverse narratives,’ she says. ‘As a gallery focusing on South Asian art, we are enjoying this openness and willingness to connect with the audience in the UK. Collaborations with institutions, participation in art fairs and an increased presence of South Asian artists in public exhibitions make London not just a market for sales, but a meaningful place for galleries and artists from our region.’

‘A Story of South Asian Art’ is on view at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, until 24 February 2026.

Zaam Arif: ‘Deewaar’, presented by Vadehra Art Gallery, is on view at No.9 Cork Street, London, until 25 October 2025.

An example of this shift in how art from the region is represented and seen, can be found in Jhaveri Contemporary’s stand at Frieze London this year. The presentation is conceived as a celebration of a contemporary ‘aesthetic hybridity [that] challenges historical ideas around form, design and ornament’, explains the gallery’s co-owner Amrita Jhaveri. This will unfold at the fair through a new installation by Lubna Chowdhary, created for the stand, of hand-glazed ceramics stacked on shelves within a sapele wood frame, in ‘a hybrid celebration of design, from modernism to Islamic geometric patterning’. This will be shown alongside abstract, illusory paintings by Rana Begum and Kaur’s steel, copper and fabric sculpture, Untitled (Bed) (2020).

Acknowledging the dyadic exchange between places, nations and diasporas, Jhaveri, who is based in London, says: ‘For us, it is always important to exhibit artists based in the UK in conversation with those based in South Asia and to show new works in dialogue with historical ones.’

At Frieze Masters, the gallery will introduce underappreciated Bangladeshi sculptor

The increased visibility of Indian art in London transcends a regional market trend or cultural moment; it allows a redefinition of India’s vast and varied art with new global perspectives, rooted in a profound knowledge of the local context. Vadehra’s stand at Frieze London focuses exclusively on South Asian women artists from four different generations, while at Frieze Masters, 61-year-old Anju Dodiya was selected as one of six artists for the ‘Studio’ section curated by Sheena Wagstaff. These concurrent presentations embrace and amplify the voices of South Asian women as powerful contributors to discourse on gender politics, examine endemic violence against women and social justice, while tracing deep historical roots that have previously been overlooked. Works on show include oil and watercolours, sculptures, ceramics and mixed media. ‘There’s a growing interest in and respect for Indian galleries in the UK,’ says Vadehra. ‘We are no longer seen as regional representatives of “Indian art” but as serious contributors exhibiting artists whose practices are relevant and speak beyond geographical or cultural boundaries.’

Seoul Calling Shamanic Robots and False Horizons: ‘Korean Artists Today’ in London

Visitors to this year’s Frieze London will be met by some rather unusual guards at the entrance to the tent. Four towering robots, resembling trees, are being installed by artist Byungjun Kwon. The Korean multimedia polymath is renowned for his work across sound, installation and machine-building, and is particularly adept at imbuing the hard edges of robotics with a tender fragility. His strange guardians move to ritualistic rhythms, as if swaying in an imperceptible breeze, as visitors cross the threshold from leafy royal park to international art fair.

Korean Artists Today (KAT), a programme established by the Korea Arts Management Service (KAMS) in 2023, promotes groundbreaking and innovative practice from Korea. Alongside the organiziation’s grant-giving initiatives and collaborative projects, the KAT platform showcases an annual shortlist of eight emerging and mid-career artists on the wider world stage, all of whom represent the rich variety and breadth of contemporary Korean art.

Kwon is one of two artists – alongside painter Min ha Park – who have been invited in a collaboration between KAMS and Frieze to present their work in London. ‘I have never been to the fair before,’ he says, ‘so it will be interesting to see people interact with the pieces,’ adding, ‘in my work, there is no barrier between actor and audience’. Indeed, Kwon is no stranger to producing complex, participatory installations outside a traditional gallery setting. Following a career as a musician and audio technician, the latter honed while studying in the Netherlands, he has spent years developing auditory systems that allow the viewer to turn collaborator.

For example, at this year’s Aichi Triennale in Japan, Kwon installed a ‘wandering sound sculpture’ titled Speak Slowly, and It Will Become a Song (2025). Having donned headsets, visitors roamed across acres of parkland, manipulating what they could hear through subtle movements, thanks to precise GPS technology. For a

new piece for Frieze London, the artist is employing the same technology, producing a soundscape that is unique not only to the fair, but to each and every visitor.

While Kwon has, in part, built his artistic practice on the foundation of his former profession, it was frustration with her classical musical training that led Park down her path as an artist. Dissatisfied with playing other people’s scores, she embraced the potential of visual art, first finding her footing within the strictures and alchemy of printmaking, before transitioning to oil on canvas in a journey of broadly self-guided study. ‘It’s like cooking,’ she says. ‘In the beginning you keep failing, but eventually you make something delicious. You can follow recipes, but ultimately you have to figure it out for yourself.’

Park developed her talent at New York’s School of Visual Arts, followed by an MFA at Yale, and became enamoured by the inherent slowness of painting dry-on-dry with oils. Adopting such a time-consuming, traditional technique might seem at odds with the artist’s science-fiction inflected abstractions, yet her obsession with the illusionary qualities of her materials is in step with a wider return to painting reflected in the Seoul art scene. ‘There has always been great interest in what we call “new media”,’ she says, ‘but younger artists are definitely embracing painting as a new mode of expression.’

Park’s interest in painting is connected to her fascination with the layers of visual language in digital culture, as well as the corporeal world. In her work, she seeks to convey a particular feeling, as opposed to evoking a recognizable scene or image, ultimately eschewing figuration. Her unique code of false horizons, celestial shapes and synthetic colours is enhanced by glittering metallic grounds that seem to emit an otherworldly light. For Frieze, she is presenting two canvases that reference the oppressive weather often experienced in Seoul, as well as the series ‘Torch’ (2023), which relates to the crowds

of office workers who congregate outside skyscrapers to smoke. Despite their seemingly disparate practices, there is a commonality to be found between these two artists. Ultimately, both unpick the intangible elements of human sensation and psychology before recrystallizing them. They grapple with the slipperiness of a reality that is increasingly dominated by digital interfaces and interactions. While Park concerns herself with texture and surface to build enigmatic allusions, Kwon engages both mind and body to

build new ways of reading the world. Such concerns have been incubated in Seoul, but they ultimately hold a resonance with far greater reach.

Take a virtual tour with our free arts and culture guide.

Jane and Louise Wilson Performance of Entrapment

17 July 2025 – 10 January 2026

A Word in Your Ear Road Testing the O cial Digital Guide to Frieze Sculpture and Beyond

I wander, entombed by towering glass and metal, through the quiet streets of the City of London. It’s a blisteringly hot and sunny summer weekend, but the chatter of the cafés and main roads has faded away. ere’s no one else around and yet I’m not alone. In my ear is a friendly, precise voice. An artist, passionately telling me about his craft. I round a corner, and I see it: an inconspicuous sculpture in a small square.

‘ e works are a series of engraved brass plaques that are mounted on benches in and around the City,’ says the voice of artist Oliver Bragg in my ear. ‘ ese are gently humorous and take you in a di erent direction … I enjoy the surprise in everyday life. It’s taking away from the banality of everyday rituals.’ He has been part of my journey through Sculpture in the City, an annual outdoor contemporary sculpture project, taking place across London’s Square Mile, which I’ve discovered through the Bloomberg Connects app.

Bloomberg Connects is an intuitive companion as I wend my way around the diverse sculptural displays – from Ai Weiwei’s cast-iron depictions of ancient tree roots at St Botolph without

Bishopsgate, to Jane and Louise Wilson’s magnified scans of DNA strands, molluscs and bits of tree, plastered to the underside of the shining escalators at the Leadenhall Building. As I use the app, it functions in several distinct ways: as a live map to navigate the streets, as an audio-descriptive device with recordings of artists discussing their work, and as a written guidebook.

With more than 5.7 million users across 40 countries, and available in more than 50 languages, Bloomberg Connects is the art-lover’s friend. It has a huge array of digital guides, encompassing everything from museums and art galleries to historic sites. In London alone, you can use it to live-tour the London Canal Museum or learn about Black women breaking down cultural barriers at the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton.

One of its most exciting applications this year is at Frieze Sculpture, the annual free public art display that runs concurrently with Frieze London and Frieze Masters, and which opened in e Regent’s Park in September. is year’s theme – the vision of curator Fatoş Üstek – is the evocative ‘In the Shadows’, featuring works from 14 international artists

Bloomberg Connects is the O cial Digital Guide for Frieze Sculpture. A free digital guide to cultural organizations around the world, Bloomberg Connects makes it easy to access and engage with over 1,000 participating arts and culture spaces from mobile devices, anytime, anywhere. As O cial Digital Guide for Frieze Sculpture, the Bloomberg Connects app o ers unique content including interviews with exhibiting artists, an interactive map and an exclusive audio tour by Fatoş Üstek, Frieze Sculpture curator. Bloomberg Connects is free to download via Apple Store or Google Play. To access the O cial Digital Guide for Frieze Sculpture, scan the QR code below:

that take on darkness, hidden realms, memory and myth. ‘Shadows are not mere voids,’ says Üstek in her curatorial statement. ‘ ey are zones of potential, where stories unfold quietly yet powerfully, often out of sight.’

As with previous years, Bloomberg Connects provides audio guides, artist commentary and valuable way-fi nding help for visitors. e works range from King of the Mountain (2024–25), by the Native American artist and activist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, who passed away in January, which addresses Indigenous legacy, land and memory through to Erwin Wurm’s Ghost (Substitutes) (2022), an empty suit of clothing suspended as if inhabited by an unseen figure. As Wurm himself explains on the app, ‘From a sculptural point of view, the suit is the second skin of our body. [...] So it speaks about identity, it speaks about selfawareness, it speaks about social issues, sculptural issues.’

Back at Sculpture in the City, I wind my way through more quiet streets, discovering new works at every turn. Outside 70 St Mary Axe sits Andrew Sabin’s creepy, tentacle-like Looping Loop (2025), which was hand-sculpted in pastry

margarine, before being cast in bonded stone. Further along, at the corner of Bishopsgate and Wormwood Street, there’s a huge gleaming gold sculpture of a paper bag by Richard Mackness. Titled Temple (2023), the mundane is suddenly monumental: a throwaway object transformed into something sacred. is could have been a lonely exercise, but the app makes it purposeful. It takes me on a treasure hunt and gives me a richer, deeper understanding of artworks that I might otherwise have simply walked past. In the heart of the City, I suddenly get the feeling that everything around me is sculpture. Everything around me is art. We just need to stop, look and listen.

London’s artists are a community of diverse nationalities and heritages. From the emerging to the established, meet five presenting work at this year’s Frieze London. Photography by Kerry J. Dean

CAPITAL GAINS

Lubna Chowdhary

Anchoring the stand at Jhaveri Contemporary, Lubna Chowdhary’s Assembly (2025) is a new work made for the fair. A shelflife framework of tropical Sapele wood holds an arrangement of geometrical ceramic tiles, each one brightly coloured, a fragment of a wider decorative scheme or language: together, it forms a kind of polyglot community.

Born in Tanzania to Pakistani parents, Chowdhary moved to the UK in 1970, but her research remains connected to a global diasporic culture: in particular, the grammar of ornament found in Middle Eastern and South Asian architecture, where highly decorated surfaces are typical. Collating a personal survey of these forms within a structure that nods to modernist European furniture design, Assembly speaks to an idea of parallel cultural traditions, and the moments when they meet. ‘I relished their awkwardness,’ the artist said to Emily King of the V&A’s collection of furniture Indian craftsmen made for British colonial classes in the 19th century in a 2017 interview.

At No.9 Cork Street earlier in 2025, Chowdhary exhibited part of an ongoing series of ‘Disobedient Typologies’ (2021–), which builds on her major installation Metropolis (1991–2019), in Dubai’s Jameel Art Centre. Completed over a 28-year period, Metropolis presents a miniature

city of more than 1,000 handmade clay sculptures, bustling with the fabulous plurality of a city described by Ibn Battuta or Italo Calvino. Chowdhary’s work, too, travels the world: you can find permanent commissions everywhere from a mosque in Aberdeen to a hotel in New Delhi.

Lubna Chowdhary is represented by Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai (Stand B24).

Adelaide Cioni

Based between London and Spoleto, Adelaide Cioni is known primarily for her layered, fabric-based installations. Yet her practice is deeply rooted in drawing, which she studied at the University of California, Los Angeles – less as a means of depiction, but more as a primal response to and communication of fundamental sensory experiences.

For ‘Ab ovo / On Patterns’, her first solo exhibition in the UK at London’s Mimosa House in 2023, Cioni focussed on pattern as a primal, universal form. Featuring a range of abstract forms that are found across history and cultures –from grids and stripes to circles and stars – the exhibition re-positioned pattern through a feminist lens. Cioni treated this language – sometimes marginalized as merely decorative, of ‘lacking’ an authoritative voice or originator – as a non-narrative response to the world, emphasizing

Lighting Assistant Akira Trees

Production

Artem Project

Post-production Russ at Daybreak Creative

its capacity to evoke or approximate experience outside or symbolic systems. Visitors were encouraged not just to look, but to feel: brushing up against works and touching them. Pattern is ‘the visualization of a rhythm in space’, the artist said of the exhibition, which also featured musical selections corresponding to each pattern motif, and a performance, Song for a Triangle, a Circle, a Square (2023). Cioni’s interest in translation – of experience into mark and of ideas across media, from object to sound to movement – is perhaps linked to the decade she spent as a literary translator of American writers including John Cheever, Lydia Davis and David Foster Wallace. Like one of Davis’s famously abrupt, bewitching stories, at their best Cioni’s stitched and painted fabric pieces also convey complex interiority with mysterious simplicity: the deft precision of a haiku.

Adelaide Cioni is represented by The Approach, London (B06), and P420, Bologna (A22).

Oli Epp

If Richard Hamilton, Patrick Nagel, Emily Mae Smith and Rob Pruitt all got into a blender, the resulting soup might look something like a canvas by Oli Epp. Born in London in 1994 – the same year Netscape launched, transforming the internet into a user-friendly, visual inter-

face – the artist models his subjects with the flawless smoothness of digital renders. Delicacy (2024), in his solo exhibition at Perrotin in New York in 2024, depicted the blue carapace of a lobster like the crisp shell of a peanut M&M.

In fact, the artist keeps a gumball machine full of the same confectionary in his kitchen, while his studio space boasts an Elvis Presley jukebox. The extreme convenience of consumer culture – Epp’s paintings abound with waiters, mouths, Martinis, sushi – is one of the artist’s preoccupations, alongside an anxious interest in the speed and pliability of the digital. ‘Clear History’, the group show he curated at Perrotin in Paris earlier this year explored the possibilities of infinite revision, transformation and erasure online. As in reaction to these dizzying freedoms, the artist’s disciplined brushwork also births images of restraint – the bands on the lobster’s claws, eyepatches clinging to two faceless grooms, red ribbons which entangle the wings of two flamingos.

This delicious tension will be on full display in new works which Perrotin are presenting on their stand, alongside focussed showcases of Danielle Orchard and Susumu Kamijo.

Oli Epp is represented by Perrotin, Paris (C10).

Janice Kerbel

It sometimes feels like we’re always catching up with Janice Kerbel, so often has her work of the last two or so decades pre-empted many turns in contemporary practice. An intuitive engagement with performance? See 2014’s multipart songcycle DOUG, which was nominated for the Turner Prize. Orchestrating technology into ballet? See the 2011 performance for lights, Kill the Workers!, staged at London’s Chisenhale Gallery. Covert infiltration of regulated spaces? See 15 Lombard St (2000), when Kerbel posed as an architecture student to study Coutts’s bank, resulting in a detailed instruction manual for a heist. Throughout, she has paid attention to themes of conspiracy, communication and codes of behaviour with an austere focus.

Kerbel was born in Toronto and, after studying across Canada, moved to London in the 1990s for an MFA at Goldsmith’s, where she is now a professor. For Kerbel, performance developed quite spontaneously out of her static objects. While she has continued to create sui generis projects (this year, Smile!, a sort of dance recital using only the facial expressions of a single performer, was performed at i8 in Reykjavík), her formal material language only develops in rigour and sensitivity: see the delicately curved and folded handmade paper works produced with

Singapore’s STPI. Her works in mosaic, an example of which will be presented at the fair by i8 Gallery, evoke the tiled surfaces of public spaces: places that don’t belong to us, but where we nevertheless sometimes find ourselves.

Janice Kerbel is represented by i8 Gallery, Reykjavik (C3), and Galerie Karin Guenther, Hamburg (C12).

Rafal Zajko

Born in Białystok in northeastern Poland, Rafal Zajko draws on the legacy of Soviet industry and the experience of hyper-capitalist development in London, ploughing themes of labour, value and time. His 2023 solo at London’s Queercircle, ‘Clocking Off’, reimagined the experience of the artist’s grandparents and their work in a textile factory, which Zajko would visit after school. Freestanding ceramic sculptures took the form of industrial bobbins, scaled to appear like ancient totems, while a hanging pendulum that swung terrifyingly at regular intervals, referencing the strictly regulated eight-hour shifts of the factory, and bringing time palpably into the space. The idea of duration as endless repetition was continued at Southend’s Focal Point Gallery this year, where an installation of reliefs, sculpture and furniture was rearranged ritualistically by volunteers and collaborators throughout the exhibi-

tion’s run. A vape-activated sculpture, A Star is Born (2025), meanwhile, evoked the idea of the time capsule: a vessel to preserve the ephemeral moment indefinitely into the future, like a jar of pickles. Look out for more pickling in the Focus section, where Zajko presents an installation incorporating different areas of his practice into a kind of theatrical set. At its core, Amber Chamber III (2025) is an inhabitable sculpture, made from high-performance engineered wood, studded with tiles. Throughout the fair, it will be periodically inhabited by the performance artist Agnieszka Szczotka, who will conjure versions of the siren – a folkloric figure whose name is now synonymous with the protection of property and the policing of space. The presentation’s title is ‘Song to the Siren (Echo)’, nodding to the 1970 Tim Buckley song, which was famously reinterpreted by the dream pop band This Mortal Coil. Like a good cover version, Zajko’s work also takes something from one time, and makes it new.

Rafał Zajko is presented by Coulisse, Stockholm (F28).

Rochester Square

Acquired as half an acre of disused land in 2016 by a local couple – Italian artist Francesca Anfossi and her Canadian partner Eric Wragge – Rochester Square is today a thriving centre for ceramic production. Situated in Camden, north London, its kilns and studios are used by around 40 ceramicists on a regular basis and it supports project-based residents, who have so far included Jonathan Baldock, Lucia Pizzani, Renee So and Rafał Zajko. Partnerships with art schools, community groups, primary schools and institutions such as Camden Art Centre have provided the focus for socially engaged projects, and Laura Bartlett curated a sculpture garden for this year’s open day. Community is at the heart of the organization – members cook for each other on a regular rota, while seasonal dinners for studio users and their guests are held four times a year in the shared spaces. With its focus on clay, Rochester Square’s attention is also appropriately on the Earth: a monthly club tends to the garden, home to seven chickens.

www.rochestersquare.co.uk

Fuel economy figures and CO2 results for the BMW i7 range: Mpg (l/100km): Not applicable. CO2 emissions: 0 g/km. Electric range: 321.9 – 387.1 miles. The BMW i7 is a battery electric vehicle requiring mains electricity for charging. The electric range figures shown were achieved using the WLTP test procedure and provided for comparability purposes. Only compare with other cars tested to the same technical procedures. These figures may not reflect real­life driving results, which will depend upon a number of factors including the starting charge of the battery, accessories fitted (post registration), variations in weather, driving styles and vehicle load. Whilst we recommend the battery for these vehicles is normally charged to 80% to help optimise the health and life of your battery, these WLTP figures were obtained after the battery had been charged to 100%.

THE i7 BAYERISCHE MOTOREN WERKE

From Soho to Peckham, a community of young art booksellers in London is winning new audiences with an instinctive, personal approach to curation. Lillian Wilkie goes browsing. Illustration by Carolina Moscoso

ONE FOR THE BOOKS

In his 1983–84 painting Cecil Court, London W.C.2. (The Refugees), R.B. Kitaj imagines the titular London street as a theatre stage, with its characters – Jewish booksellers, refugees from Nazi Germany – illuminated by the warm light emanating from Cecil Court’s 19th-century shop windows. In the foreground, Kitaj himself reclines on a Le Corbusier chaise longue, perhaps with a book in hand. This pedestrianized street, connecting St Martin’s Lane with Charing Cross Road, recorded its first bookseller in 1704, and has long been associated with bookshops and publishing; William and Gilbert Foyle opened their first West End shop there in 1904, whilst famed occultist Aleister Crowley is said to have cast a spell making all the volumes in Watkins Books disappear and reappear on one of his many visits to London’s oldest occult bookshop, just a few doors down.

Today, the street retains a stalwart selection of independent retailers selling rare first-edition novels, prints, maps, antiques and archival fashion. For the last ten years, it has also been home to Tenderbooks, one of central London’s last remaining independent bookshops specializing in contemporary art publishing, alongside rare, archival and avant-garde material. Run by Tamsin Clark, the shop hosts weekly book launches, readings and performances, and a programme of exhibitions and artist window displays, featuring the likes of Cory Arcangel, Atelier E.B., Baldwin Lee and Carolee Schneemann. ‘For this year’s Frieze Week we’re collaborating with [Clerkenwellbased gallery] Brunette Coleman,’ reveals Clark. ‘We’ll present a site-specific window installation by the artist and translator Miriam Stoney that utilizes text and the book object to reflect on language and acts of translation.’ The project seems especially fitting in relation to the selection of books and ephemera offered at Tenderbooks, which reflect Clark’s extensive knowledge and appreciation of concrete poetry, European cinema, eccentric Japanese publishing and experimental modes of thinking and writing.

A stroll up Charing Cross Road might disclose little of the rich bookselling culture for which the area was once known, but recent openings in Soho continue to draw bibliophiles to the West End. Rare fashion and photobook dealer IDEA has

supplemented its Dover Street Market concessions with a retail space that feels like an Aladdin’s cave alongside its offices on Wardour Street. It is always packed with art directors, image-makers and students attuned to both the tactile thrill of print and its relevance to contemporary creative research. Isabella Burley’s Climax Books will reward anyone brave enough to scale the precarious staircase up to the first floor of this Georgian building on Wardour Mews with a tightly curated selection of the most hard-tofind titles from the worlds of Hollywood, underground cinema, erotica and avantgarde fashion. The shop’s highly anticipated move to a more spacious, street-level store in Clerkenwell this autumn will allow a broader programme of social events and publishing projects. ‘We’re excited to have a storefront in London that echoes the design and sensibility of our New York flagship,’ says Burley. ‘There will be rubber floors, stainless steel and latex.’

It is outside the West End, however, that some of the city’s most idiosyncratic book stores can be found. After leaving its iconic Charing Cross Road space in 2016 and heading east, Claire de Rouen Books firmly established roots in Bethnal Green, where, alongside photography, artist monographs and critical theory, its selection favours self-published and short-run photo zines, periodicals and cutting-edge magazines. The furniture was designed by London-based Japanese design duo Mentsen. ‘It allows us to display the books as objects,’ says co-director Chantal Webber, ‘for a more bespoke, alive and intimate curation.’ She describes Claire de Rouen as a ‘living archive’, bridging bookselling, curation and gallery projects, ‘to cultivate an intimate space for discovery, dialogue and community’.

It’s an ethos shared by Nick Mennell, whose Record 28 Books can be found at the Shoreditch end of Hackney Road. Specializing in rare titles from the worlds of alternative fashion and counter-culture, Mennell designed and built much of the interior himself, keen for the space to reflect his personality and point of view rather than feel like a sterile boutique. Despite the hefty price tag (£200) of an out-of-print title such as David Lynch’s Images (1994), Mennell has a teenage version of himself in mind when sourcing for the shop, having arrived in London

Central London Tenderbooks tenderbooks.co.uk

IDEA

ideanow.online

Climax Books climaxbooks.com

East London Claire de Rouen Books shop.clairederouen books.com

Record 28 Books record28.com

Donlon Books

donlonbooks.com

Public Knowledge Books publicknowledgebooks. com

South London BOOKS books-peckham.com

from a naval academy in Hull to study for a degree in fashion. ‘Unlike some places, I allow photography,’ he says. ‘I like people to sit down and go through things. If they love it but it’s out of their price range, I even encourage them to think about where else they could access that kind of material. I don’t want this to be an oldschool kind of space. I want it to feel like a community, an educational resource.’

Up towards London Fields, Conor Donlon will celebrate 20 years of bookselling this year, first operating from a nook in Herald St gallery, then, since 2008, at his much-loved shop, Donlon Books, on Broadway Market. It’s the perfect place for an afternoon browsing a kaleidoscopic selection of both new and rare titles on art, design, alternative music, queer culture and esoterica, or just having a gossip with Donlon, who previously worked for Wolfgang Tillmans and runs the business with a worldly intelligence, democratic spirit and dry sense of humour. ‘There’s no elitism here,’ he says. ‘I enjoy selling a book that costs £10.99 as much as a rare one. We stick to our guns and our principles. We rarely work with brands. We get people asking to do photoshoots, and it’s always “no”. The selection is very personal to me, and I only work with people who have shared values.’

If you want to browse at Public Knowledge Books, on Walthamstow’s Hoe Street, it’s best to come on a Saturday when it’s officially open to the public, although appointments can be made at other times. The business primarily operates as a distributor of books and magazines on art, poetry, architecture, design and underground culture, working directly with some of the best bookshops across London and beyond. On Saturdays, a curtain is drawn across the office space and the store welcomes passers-by with a range of books that taps into the area’s long association with radicalism, socialism and feminism. ‘On the weekend we opened, there was a massive mobilization against the far right just down the road,’ managing director Bryony Lloyd tells me. ‘So it’s no surprise that titles like Thick Press’s An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping (2024) and Black Lodge Press’s anarchist gardening zines sell very well.’

This sense of feeling embedded within a local community and respond-

ing to its concerns is shared by Peter Willis, proprietor of BOOKS in Peckham. Firmly a ‘used book’ shop rather than a modern antiquarian, around 80 percent of the shop’s stock is sourced from house clearances within south-east London, and curated according to feedback from regulars. While his selection leans heavily towards paperback novels and non-fiction, Willis recently completed a PhD in the material and technological histories of zine culture, and this critical appreciation of all things low-budget and DIY finds form in an expansive selection of contemporary zines and small-press publications. This is the place to explore how the legacies of 20th-century artist publishing practices play out in the present, and pick up unusual periodicals, one-offs and artists multiples that could become the collectors’ items of tomorrow.

What all these shops share is an approach to sourcing and curation that eschews algorithmic market logic in favour of an instinctive, constellatory approach, wherein each book in turn points to another. None of these booksellers organizes their stock in labelled categories; they apply free association, and aesthetic and social connections, to bring books together in dialogue. In a world of paralyzing choice, where seemingly every kind of commodity is available at our fingertips, London’s best art bookshops reflect the idiosyncrasies of their owners’ personalities and passions, while providing increasingly rare opportunities for discovery and chance. Kitaj’s Cecil Court scene, underpinned by the traumas of exile, emphasizes the social aspects of book culture, and is redolent of the ways in which bookshops are often lynchpins for a broader community of artists, thinkers, collectors and aficionados, and their friends. They are spaces to congregate, ask questions, cast spells, take refuge and form connections, amid a shared consciousness of the sensual pleasures and liberatory potential of books.

Created by Abercrombie & Kent exclusively for Frieze London 2025, Howard Hodgkin’s India: A Cultural Journey follows in the artist’s footsteps to the places that inspired so many of his paintings – from Delhi’s Mughal forts and Rajasthan’s painted palaces to the vibrant neighbourhoods where he stayed in Gujurat and Mumbai. Enriched by unique experiences, this private Tailormade Journey is a deep dive into not just Hodgkin’s life and work, but India itself.

To find out more or book Howard Hodgkin’s India: A Cultural Journey, call us on 020 3608 8216 or visit abercrombiekent.com

An initiative by Degussa Goldhandel with Monopol

Learn more about Degussa‘s commitment to art: We announce the shortlist for the current Young Generation Art Award and introduce you to the winner of the first award, Thuy Tien Nguyen, at Frieze London.

15 – 19 October 2025 | The Regent’s Park

Mariana Teixeira de Carvalho’s fascination with artists has led her to amass a collection spanning Sonia Gomes, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lubaina Himid and Cecilia Vicuña. It’s stood her in good stead to lead a foundation dedicated to her family collection of porcelain, she tells Alessio Antoniolli. Photography by

Suleika Mueller

‘YOU JUST WANT TO GET INSIDE THEIR HEADS’

ALESSIO ANTONIOLLI

We first met when you moved to London, maybe 12 or 15 years ago. We met through artists and I think we both live our lives surrounded by artists. Does collecting for you start with the artist or with the work?

MARIANA TEIXEIRA DE CARVALHO

For me, everything starts with the artist. It can also start with the work, which takes you to the artist, who then leads you back to the work. Sometimes you just get into the work before knowing anything about who made it. A lot of people say that you have to dissociate the person from the artist, but it’s very difficult to do that – especially if they are your contemporaries. For me, it’s about knowing that some people have a long journey ahead of them, and wanting to be a part of it, wanting to help them realize their potential.

AA A good friend of ours, who is also a collector, once said to me that going into an artist’s studio is like going inside an artist’s head. When you visit a studio, what questions do you ask?

MTC Every practice is different; every personality is different. You have artists who are outspoken, while some are extremely shy; some hate to talk about their work, and some have a formula at the ready; some have pristine studios, almost like showrooms; other studios are small and messy. Sometimes there

isn’t a lot of work to see, but you just want to get inside their heads. I allow them to take the lead.

AA You’ve been invited into an intimate space, after all.

MTC I’ve got a very old-school way of collecting. The work has to mean something to me. The practice has to resonate in some form. Although my interests may shift, I have never sold anything in my collection. It’s not that it is wrong to do so: sometimes you want to oxygenate what you’ve got, or the works don’t mean as much to you anymore, or you haven’t got enough physical space and so they have to have a second life somewhere else. But, so far, my selection still makes sense and still ‘fits’ me.

AA Your background is in law, but you then went on to work for renowned galleries: Luisa Strina in São Paulo, and Hauser & Wirth and Michael Werner Gallery in London. What led you to art?

MTC It wasn’t a rational decision; it happened organically. I think the way that some artists can tackle a topic in such a focused way, for me correlates to law. Artists can tackle difficult topics in a subtle, very precise way, and shed light on unpleasant or uncomfortable subjects very effectively. Art is a vehicle that can invoke empathy in a way that is non-confrontational and non-aggressive.

AA Absolutely. Art reflects society, but it also has the potential to challenge

it and to push at the boundaries. MTC It asks the questions and then leaves it to the audience. I admire artists who do this in a rigorous way. For instance, Lawrence Abu Hamdan. I have a couple of very uncomfortable but extremely powerful works by him. They are very beautiful at the same time as being meaningful. His work has so many layers.

Cildo Meireles is another artist I collect who is also very political, and there are so many ways of interpreting what he’s doing. Then there are others who challenged their times, often through their own circumstances, like Lubaina Himid, Sonia Gomes, Liliane Lijn and Cecilia Vicuña.

AA Do you find you naturally gravitate towards certain types of work, themes or artists?

MTC I’m attracted to people who take very strong positions. I’m drawn to female artists from a particular time in history. I’ve got a lot of works by older women, some of whom are not alive anymore, but some who are, and who are still extremely prolific, but it has taken them a lifetime to be recognized. There’s still a long way for the art world to grow and catch up in that sense. It’s changing, but it’s slow.

At the same time, I follow very young artists. You don’t know where they’re going to go, but if I see potential, I’m interested.

AA Which is also part of the beauty, because you are actually supporting them through their career. You can see them grow. You don’t have to like every bit of their career, but you can appreciate their journey, in the same way that you are on a journey as a collector.

MTC It’s important to be open to everything. I’m not a video collector, but I do have a few video works because they speak to me. I leave it completely open.

AA Do you have any pearls of wisdom for collectors starting out?

MTC Maybe don’t be too serious about it. Enjoy it.

AA Enjoy it and follow what makes sense to you.

MTC Respect the process. Respect the artists more than anything else. Try to give them the correct platform. If you want to be part of all this, you also have to be in it for the long run and for the right reasons. You can’t be too rational: you must do your research, know where to go and who to trust, but also remain open to instinct and emotion.

AA With your decisions, how much comes from the heart and how much from the head? Which wins out when you decide to acquire something?

MTC There’s always an element of impulsiveness. You have to respond to the work. You have to think about it again, to keep going back to it. Then it makes sense to pursue it. You also have to be exposed

This page, from top On wall, centre: Vojtech Kovarik, Tension 2021; on wall, right: Masaomi Yasunaga, Empty Vessel 2021. Patterned fireclay Rosewood bench by Sergio Rodrigues, c.1958. On bench: László Borsódy, Otherwise, 1973

Enrico David, Fortress Shadow, 2017. On wall: Antonio Oba, HerÓi do Fogo Interior 2019

Opposite page, clockwise from top left Sonia Gomes, Untitled from the series ‘Torção’, 2013

Anna Maria Maiolino, Untitled from the series ‘Contínuos’, 2004–08

Anthea Hamilton, Tutto Bene Leg Chair (Graffiti), 2020. On wall, right: Lubaina Himid, The Captain and the Mate, 2017–18

Solange Pessoa, Untitled 2008. On table: Ming dynasty candleholders

Overleaf Mariana Teixeira de Carvalho in her London apartment

The Albuquerque Foundation: albuquerquefoundation.pt

to a lot of things and know what you like. It’s a different process for different people. Some people prefer to work with advisors and get the information already filtered. I don’t; I like to filter it myself.

AA It goes back to how we started this interview – that we met through artists and that you live in the art world. You go to galleries, you know artists, you are part of the community.

MTC Exactly. Maybe one piece of advice for people starting out is not to view the art world as segmented. We try to make distinctions between who’s on each side of the equation, but it’s all part of the same whole. There are no good guys or bad guys. Everyone is needed.

AA It’s an ecosystem. You grew up in São Paulo. You’ve lived in New York and London, among other places. Have your travels and the different contexts in which you’ve lived and worked affected the way you relate to art and informed the way you collect?

MTC Absolutely. The reason I don’t stick to a theme or a moment in history is because I’m just too curious. There’s always something else that I don’t know. I’m far from knowing every art movement. I’m very grateful that I’ve had all this experience of visiting and living in different places.

AA I feel very close to the way of thinking that art is knowledge. It’s a way of learning about the world around you and understanding that there isn’t just one way of doing things. I’ve always been attracted to artists because they never choose the mainstream way; they always find the back or the side door.

MTC Also, I think that collecting is not only about acquiring objects. You’re collecting experiences, too. That’s become more and more important to me. The last piece I bought was a painting by the late Colombian artist Emma Reyes (1919–2003). Her life was as compelling as the work she made. She moved between many countries, crossed cultures, was an artist, a storyteller, a writer; she loved deeply, broke boundaries. Her œuvre, besides being very beautiful, carries that journey, which is one I somehow share.

In the end, collecting is about your approach to life in general. How much do you actually need to have, and how much do you need to give and give back?

AA Which leads us to the foundation you recently co-founded with your grandfather, Renato de Albuquerque. It was set up in February this year in Sintra, Portugal, to house his world-class collection of ceramics.

MTC My grandfather collected mostly Chinese porcelain for 60 years, never with the goal of showing it, or even creating a significant collection. He started young with European porcelain when he didn’t have the means to acquire more relevant works. The more he learned, the more he got drawn into one particular moment in history. The focus is very niche: Chinese export porcelain from the 16th to 18th centuries, even though the collection spans from the 16th century BCE.

As a family, we didn’t know how important the collection had become until a few years ago, when we started getting asked about it by specialists.

The cultural value of a collection that has been built up, like this one, over all those years, is far greater than the sum of its parts. If dismantled, it could no longer be put together.

AA It’s the unity that produces the knowledge, that produces the space for research.

MTC Yes, and that’s true of collections in general. In the case of my grandfather’s, it tells the story of trade, of different areas of the world. It tells the story of East and West, of how people lived at that time.

AA I was looking at the Albuquerque Foundation’s website and noticed that you talk about a space for research and knowledge. It’s about sharing, because these objects are basically signifiers of history.

MTC They function as artefacts, as well as having artistic value. The painting and the firing, the craftsmanship and the shapes – all of these things combine. It seems a bit ambitious to say that you can help understand the history of the world through ceramics, but you actually can. It was the first art form and we still use it for its decorative value. But it’s also part of everyday life – we eat from it, drink from it. Now people have taken to asking: is it craft? Is it fine art?

AA These conversations will go on for ever, probably.

MTC Yes, and we don’t need to define it. We just need to give it the right platform. The public can make their own decision –if it’s one or the other, or both.

AA I think one of the big questions is always how do we make things accessible? What are people interested in? The answer is that it will be constantly changing.

MTC Each collector exists in a particular time. The challenge is how to make a collection from another era relevant to a new generation and to the generations to come. I believe institutions have a duty to help us understand the past and, in so doing, help us not to repeat mistakes. You can do that through art in a much more empathetic and emotionally connective way for future generations. This is what I am trying to do in Portugal and that’s the reason we created an exhibition programme of contemporary ceramics as well as an artistic and research programme.

AA To create entry points.

MTC Yes, but also to give a platform to living artists who are exploring the medium and would like a dedicated space. We don’t ask the visiting artists to respond to the collection but, so far, everyone has shown interest. I don’t share my grandfather’s love of Chinese porcelain, but I truly admire and value its place in history. I believe you don’t need to share the same passion to do something amazing with a collection, as long as you respect and acknowledge the importance that it holds.

AA You’re talking almost as if it has become a responsibility?

MTC I see it as a duty. It’s bigger than you, than your family, and bigger than the person who created it. This collection is much bigger than my grandfather. In the end, I believe it’s an obligation rather than a privilege.

S E OK R T S H S RU “B H T I W E V I L DE A M T N E R PA S N A R T G L ” V T D E OL -SUH DO HO

The arrival of Ibraaz and Yan Du Projects in London testifies to the capital’s appeal for private art foundations. How will the addition of these initiatives to the work of the Delfina and Nicoletta Fiorucci foundations enrich the ways art is made, displayed and consumed in the city? Joe Bobowicz reports

STRONG FOUNDATIONS

It’s a balmy Tuesday evening in July, and I’m sitting at what Delfina Foundation’s founding director, Aaron Cezar, calls a ‘family dinner’. Inside the central London townhouse, high-net-worth philanthropists, gallery directors and the foundation’s artists- and curators-in-residence break bread and discuss everything from upcoming shows to contemporary geopolitics. Downstairs is an exhibition by IranianCanadian artist duo Freudian Typo (Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi), ‘Condensed Word, Displaced Flesh’, a postMarxist dissection of debt as a manipulative tool integral to Western economics. Between the main course and dessert, the residents – who hail from Brazil, Taiwan, South Korea, Tajikistan, Cameroon and Chile, among other places – are each given a few minutes to present their practices. The room poses critical questions between each presentation. When I was first invited, the ‘family’ concept struck me as gimmicky but, by the end of the evening, I’m close to being convinced.

A week prior to this, over a video call, Cezar regales me with details of the foundation’s beginnings in 2007, when Spanish-British patron Delfina Entrecanales transformed the Delfina Studio Trust (1988–2006) – an organization renowned for igniting the careers of acclaimed British artists, such as Sonia Boyce, Veronica

Ryan and Mark Wallinger – into an international project. The late Entrecanales decided that the Middle East and North Africa, where she had been travelling, should be the starting point, and in particular those artists giving a fresh perspective on the region. ‘At that time, we were still in the post-9/11 period,’ explains Cezar. ‘There was this very divisive language in the press. Within all of this, it was important for us to think about London as almost a third place, not as the UK, but as a space where the world could gather.’ Partnerships with the Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Serpentine quickly gave artists from MENA a voice in the UK, and, after those initial years, the foundation expanded to cover a broader geography. Some key projects include Kurdish-Turkish artist Ahmet Öğüt’s ‘The Silent University’ at Tate Modern in 2012, a collaboration with skilled asylum seekers legally unable to work, and Avani Tanya’s A Selective Guide to the V&A’s South Asian Collection (2017), a published para-institutional dissection of the museum’s archive.

This actively decolonial remoulding of the London art world relies on a collaborative approach. Cezar is well connected, also serving as a strategic advisor to Chinese patron Yan Du’s Asymmetry Art Foundation, an initiative focused on

supporting curators working with East Asian and Sinophone contemporary art. Cezar met Du around 2018, at which time she became a founding member of Delfina’s Asia-Pacific patron network. I am introduced to Du in Bloomsbury for coffee and breakfast a week after meeting Cezar. We are close to the location of her new initiative, Yan Du Projects (YDP), under construction at the time of writing, which opens in mid-October. YDP, an Asianfocused project space, forms the third wing in her trinity of patronage, joining Asymmetry and YDC – a private collection of over 800 works. Born near Beijing, Du has been collecting for over a decade. She registered Asymmetry in 2018, keen to encourage ‘knowledge production’ and bridge a gap between China and the West, having noticed a lack of Chinese art publications. The foundation, originally nomadic, but based in Hackney since 2022, has relied and thrived, like Delfina, on partnerships: fellowships at Whitechapel and Chisenhale galleries, a PhD scholarship at Goldsmiths University, a lecture series in conjunction with the Courtauld Institute of Art, and, in 2024, support for the appointment of two Tate Modern curators – Alvin Li and Hera Chan – both with specialisms in APAC art.

Du dispels the notion that YDP is a vanity project. ‘People are always saying,

“Yan is opening a space. It is just going to display her collection”,’ she laughs. It’s really about supporting artists to break through with their practice, rather than just beautiful work. I’m interested in artists who think about challenging themselves.’ Her words are ostensibly a statement of preference, but at a time when London – tarred by a non-dom exodus, a funding slowdown and, in the case of some commercial galleries, a turn to ‘safer’ displays – this kind of philanthropy is welcome. ‘I have lots of Chinese communities here,’ she says. ‘So, for me, it’s not a difficult decision to stay.’ And even if Du does eventually leave, YDP will continue as more than just a bricks-and-mortar space. ‘I want to keep it flexible,’ she explains; to this point, even the HQ has been envisioned as a ‘temporary’ and ‘modular’ structure located inside a listed Georgian house. ‘It’s like us. We are the diaspora. We come here as outsiders, we unpack and we live here.’

Such a philosophy appears as a throughline with these foundations. A few days after meeting Du, Lina Lazaar, the president of the Kamel Lazaar Foundation (KLF), calls me from Tunisia. ‘London is perhaps the most vibrant and rich city, with an immense diasporic community that has shaped it for generations,’ she says, before adding that while the relationship

Clockwise from top: ‘Ellipse and Ellipsis’, installation view at Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, 2025. Photo: Eva Herzog. Courtesy: Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, London

Lina Lazaar, 2025. Photo: © Talie Eigeland. Courtesy: Ibraaz, London

Yan Du at YDP, 2025. Photo: Jooney Woodward. Courtesy: YDP, London

Delfina Foundation: delfinafoundation.com

Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation: nf.foundation

Ibraaz: ibraaz.org

Yan Du Projects: ydp.co

between the city and its diaspora has been complex, this has no doubt contributed to London’s resilience. Currently, Lazaar’s at KLF’s new residency space, Tilal Utique. I can hear frogs croaking in the background. ‘Sorry, they’ve just woken up,’ she says, laughing. Technically based in London, in reality, she’s always between places – born in Riyadh and raised in Geneva, she worked for Sotheby’s from Jeddah as one of their first MENA art specialists between 2004 and 2015. Lazaar, whose father set up the foundation in 2005, juggles all aspects of KLF – including Jaou Tunis, a biennial she set up in Saudi Arabia in 2012. As part of her role, she’s relaunching MENA-led art platform, Ibraaz, which ran as an academic online resource between 2011 and 2017 with Professor Anthony Downey as editor-in-chief. ‘Ibraaz 2.0’, she reveals, will keep MENA front and centre while branching out to include the ‘global majority’ (the world’s non-white population) within a ‘culture of hospitality’ specific to the Arab world. Ibraaz also opens its doors in Fitzrovia in mid-October with an inaugural exhibition by Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama. ‘How do you create conditions for people to think critically like they used to during Ibraaz 1.0, but add that sense of sharing the same space?’ she ponders. ‘Those conditions of gathering

are going to be a very important part of our programming.’

Between all these conversations, I also meet with Nicoletta Fiorucci, founder of the eponymous foundation. She too is no stranger to the concept of hospitality, nor international collaboration – albeit through a more European lens. With exhibition spaces in London and Venice, collaborations and projects across Europe, and residencies, including on the Italian island of Stromboli, her organization –founded in 2010 as Fiorucci Art Trust and directed by Milovan Farronato until 2021 – made its name through unconventional media, and wild workshops and performances. Today, the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation continues with the same approach. And, even though she lives in Venice, Fiorucci proclaims, ‘I feel more of a London-minded person.’ Contradiction as confirmation: for patrons, London remains a global hub. Not to mention a great place for a dinner party.

An homage to Tunga (1952–2016) and his iconic Xifópagas Capilares entre Nós (1984), 40 years after its first appearance in a magazine

Photography by Lara Angelil

DOUBLE TROUBLE

One of the most esteemed Brazilian artists of his generation, Tunga (1952–2016) produced a body of work that remains nonetheless hard to pin down. As curator Adriano Pedrosa wrote in a 1999 issue of frieze magazine, his art ‘lures and deceives, slipping through your fingers, falling through the cracks, setting up tricks and traps’. Think of it, perhaps, like a knot of tangled hair, with skeins that can be traced but not unravelled.

Born into an intellectual family, Tunga drew on a diverse body of ideas, from psychoanalysis and science to alchemy. He worked across disciplines, focusing early in his career on drawing, before moving towards ambitious installations and sculpture, utilizing

bells, shells and braids as motifs, and elements such as lightbulbs and magnets.

(Some of the more ambitious works are preserved in two dedicated pavilions at the prestigious Inhotim Museum – and, indeed, it was a meeting with Tunga which led founder Bernardo Paz to devote his collection to contemporary art.)

As Joseph Beuys did with his ‘batteries’, Tunga sought to unleash the energetic potential of materials. One strategy was what he called ‘instaurations’ – activations of his work through performance. The most iconic of these is Xifópagas Capilares entre Nós (Capillary Xiphopagus Among Us, 1984) performed by two adolescent girls whose hair is braided together, inspired by a Nordic

myth recounted in the writing of DanishBrazilian palaeontologist Peter Wilhelm Lund about conjoined twins who unleash havoc. The following year, images of the performance were published with commentary by Tunga in the journal Revirão.

This work has been crucial to the artist’s reception in the UK: it was performed in his first solo exhibition here, at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1989; in 2015, it was recreated at Frieze London as part of the curated programme; and, in 2018, it was staged over four weekends at Tate Modern.

The mystery of the piece is part of its power. But, whatever else he is doing, in joining the two performers’ hair, Tunga creates a kind of infinite loop. Indeed,

in Revirão he connected the work to his 1981 film installation Ão, which imagines ‘a tunnel without beginning or end’. Or perhaps, given the many allusions in his work to electricity, it’s a circuit – an instance of material becoming a vessel for energy and its boundless flow. (MM)

A selection of must-see shows from across the capital that are taking place during Frieze Week, from Kerry James Marshall at the Royal Academy of Arts to Peter Doig at the Serpentine

FIVE TO SEE

Kerry James Marshall: ‘The Histories’ | Royal Academy | 20 September 2025 – 18 January 2026

More than 70 works (including a monumental 1995 commission from Chicago Public Library that has never been loaned before) plot the career of one of contemporary art’s most acclaimed painters. Born amid the racial segregation of Alabama in the 1950s and growing up in Watts, Los Angeles, Marshall has been on the front line of the Black experience in the US for 70 years. While his work has reflected popular culture – including Black beauty advertising, comic strips and science fiction – he has also remained committed to subverting a Western tradition of history painting, with the resulting tension between subject and medium seen in series such as the ‘Garden Project’ (1994–95), which evokes both renaissance visions of Eden and soothing public murals to critique the grim realities of Chicago’s Black housing projects (many of which optimistically have ‘garden’ in their name). Above all, Marshall’s work celebrates the Black figure and its many meanings as integral to Western art, and this major London show – the largest ever organized outside the States – is unmissable.

Duan Jianyu: ‘Yúqiáo’ | Yan Du Projects | 4 October – 20 December 2025

Born in 1970, Chinese painter Duan Jianyu grew up during the country’s Cultural Revolution before witnessing its demise. Her work appropriately invokes classical Chinese myths and painting techniques belied by a pervasive sense of surreal mutability, and nods to naive and folk art. This solo show, which inaugurates the exhibition space of the newly instituted Yan Du Projects in Bedford Square, is her first in the UK in a decade, and draws on a traditional motif. ‘Yúqiáo’ depicts a fisherman and a woodcutter as observers of human dreams and calamities amid timeless pastoral landscapes and contemporary urban sprawl, a device for linking past and present China through shapeshifting storytelling.

Gilbert & George: ‘21st-Century Pictures’ | Hayward Gallery | 7 October 2025 – 11 January 2026

It’s hard for any successful artist to remain a true outsider; for two to have managed it together for nearly six decades while winning the Turner Prize, representing the UK at the Venice Biennale, being elected to the Royal Academy and opening their own eponymous foundation in London is unique (and likely to stay that way). But Gilbert Prousch and George Passmore, now in their 80s, are still discomfitingly ‘other’ figures for both the establishment and the avant-garde.

Above Kerry James Marshall, Knowledge and Wonder, 1995. Photo: Patrick L. Pyszka. Courtesy: City of Chicago Public Art Program and Chicago Public Library, Legler Regional Library

‘Kerry James Marshall: The Histories’ is organized by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in collaboration with Kunsthaus Zürich and Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris

‘Living sculptures’ Gilbert & George continue to challenge what contemporary art is supposed to look, sound or think like. This show of their work from the last 25 years includes several major series –‘London Pictures’ (2011), ‘Beard Pictures’ (2016) and ‘The Corpsing Pictures’ (2020) – with their trademark mixture of the political and personal. Expect bones, bumholes, burkhas, bus stops, noz canisters and St George’s flags: your local high street, basically.

‘Egypt: Influencing British Design 1775–2025’ | Sir John Soane’s Museum | 8 October 2025 – 19 January 2026 Since Europeans first widely encountered ancient Egyptian culture in the 18th century, its ‘otherness’ has exerted a profound and sometimes troubling influence on artists and designers. One of those most captivated was London architect Sir John Soane, whose Lincoln’s Inn Fields home is the location for this exhibition. Soane’s house, partly constructed around the stone sarcophagus of Pharaoh Seti I, is itself a testament to how powerfully Egyptomania gripped Britain, and this show explores how pyramids, hieroglyphics and mummies have become part of our collective experience in the last 250 years. From Wedgwood ceramics to Liberty fabrics, and all sorts of industrial and domestic design, the exhibition includes historic designs by Robert Adam and Owen Jones, and prints by Giovanni

Battista Piranesi, while a new work by Cairo-born artist Sara Sallam, responding to Seti’s sarcophagus, brings the story into the present.

Peter Doig: ‘House of Music’ | Serpentine South Gallery | 10 October 2025 – 8 February 2026 ‘House of Music’ introduces sound into the work of painter Peter Doig for the first time. Each piece in the exhibition has a different relationship with music, depicting spaces where music is played, or showing musicians or people dancing. Doig created many of the works between 2002 and 2021, when he lived in Trinidad and re-engaged with Caribbean soundsystem culture. Known for his topographies, Doig uses ‘House of Music’ to explore the evolution of the popular aural landscape. The show features two valve cinema speaker systems, from the 1930s and 1950s respectively, and Doig has selected music from his own collection to play during the exhibition. There will also be live listening sessions featuring musicians, artists and collectors including Nihal El Aasar, Lizzi Bougatsos, Dennis Bovell, Brian Eno, Andrew Hale, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Olukemi Lijadu, Ed Ruscha, Strang and Duval.

Mona Hatoum is the latest artist in the Barbican’s exhibition series pairing contemporary work with historic sculptures by Alberto Giacometti. Here, the London-based Palestinian explains how the dialogue between their practices reveals a ‘heightened sense of isolation’ that fits our times

INTERSECTIONS

One of my main priorities for the Barbican exhibition was to include a cage. It’s a recurring motif in my practice, and I admire the way Giacometti creates cages through simple outlines. I first became aware of his work in the early 1980s, while reading Georges Bataille. I found a small notebook from years later, with a drawing I’d made of The Cage (1950–51) – the very one that’s now in this exhibition – which I saw in a retrospective at Kunsthalle Wien in 1996. While visiting the Fondation Giacometti, I selected The Nose (1947) for the show, because I had the crazy idea of removing it from its cage – which is like an open frame – and hanging it inside Cube (2006), one of my own cages. Cube is constructed of thick, wrought-iron bars, like those on the windows of medieval buildings or prisons, with no way in or out. By putting The Nose inside Cube, it amplifies the expression

of horror on the sculpture’s face, evoking the impact of confinement and isolation. Normally, I’d have a structure and leave the viewer to imagine what could be taking place inside, but here I was being opportunistic, and I took advantage of the sculpture’s expression of angst. At first, the Fondation said, ‘No, we have to respect the fact this work exists in its own cage’, but I was pleased that they later accepted the idea.

One of the new works I’ve made for the exhibition is Untitled (cage) (2025).

I used steel reinforcement bars to create the outline of a cage, similar to the way in which Giacometti delineates space. It is roughly the size of a human head. I was thinking about psychological entrapment and the limitations placed on our imagination to make us conform.

I experimented with putting a few different things inside it, but nothing

worked. I almost abandoned it, then found a piece of hand-blown red glass that had been in the studio since 2012. The two elements are very different – a smooth, shiny, fragile form juxtaposed with the harsh, rough metal bars. Although the red shape is only a blob of glass, it looks like a lacerated body part, inside a rebar cage. I often rely on happy accidents, as in the coming together of these two elements. Untitled (cage) is displayed in a cabinet with Giacometti’s Head Skull (1934).

The Barbican’s new gallery is quite intimate, with a low ceiling and dimensions that are close to a domestic space. It’s the perfect place to show Interior Landscape (2008) and Remains of the Day (2016–18) – both room-sized installations of altered domestic furniture – and Incommunicado (1993) continues that theme. Round and Round (2006), a circle

of soldiers on top of a bronze side table, has a rapport with Giacometti’s Four Figurines on a Stand (1950). Divide (2025) is actually the first and largest work I made for the exhibition, developed in response to the setting. I visualized a fence or barrier cutting through the space; it still allows a view of the pond, fountains and greenery beyond, but filters it through something that denotes restriction and containment. Divide later evolved into a medical screen on wheels; I replaced the cloth panels with a grid of barbed wire, so it became like a mobile border. My work often introduces an element of threat, implies impending disaster or portrays its aftermath in the domestic sphere.

For me, the most important sculpture by Giacometti that I am including is Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932), a contorted, dismembered, surreal creature. It suggests the scene of a crime, but its abstraction distances it from pure horror. My work Untitled (meat grinder) (2005) makes an oblique reference to this piece. Meat grinder is a bronze cast of a utensil, similar to one in my family’s kitchen when I was growing up. As a child, it was something I regarded with total dread. My mother warned me not to go near it, not to put my little fingers inside or turn the handle. She used it to mince meat, which to me looked like flesh. The object’s implied violence gives it an affinity with Woman with Her Throat Cut. I stay away from representing atrocities, because we’re assaulted by images of horror every day. My strategy is to create an undercurrent of violence, and viewers can complete the narrative by bringing their own interpretations.

Often, I use the language of minimalism and geometry, with no predetermined readings. Any associations people make come from their own experience. Sometimes, I like to contradict and deflate heavy issues with elements of humour. Roadworks (1985) – a video in which I walk barefoot through Brixton, south London, dragging a pair of Dr. Martens boots – references the police presence there, but it’s funny as well. Last October, when I visited the foundation and the warehouse where Giacometti’s sculptures are stored, I saw several tiny maquettes of walking figures, exquisitely made. Roadworks creates a dialogue with Giacometti’s walking figures, like Figurine Between Two Houses (1950), an isolated female figure that appears threatened by the urban buildings to each side.

Giacometti’s central themes are more relevant today than ever before. I think we’re experiencing a heightened sense of isolation, alienation, vulnerability and uncertainty. It seems the whole world has been turned upside down. Everything is so polarized. In the original version of Hot Spot (2006), I depicted the whole world as a conflict zone. But the conflict is now much worse and more widespread. However, I like my work to remain ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations. Rather than showing graphic violence, I create objects and environments that suggest danger, but leave individuals to imagine the disaster for themselves.

In a momentous season for contemporary art in Central Asia, with major events and openings in Alamaty, Bukhara and Tashkent, a curated exhibition at No.9 Cork Street brings a new perspective to the region’s artistic heritage and future. By

Skye Sherwin

ALL EYES ON CENTRAL ASIA

This month, ‘To everything spurn, spurn, spurn’, curated by the international art collective Slavs and Tatars for Artwin Gallery, will bring trailblazing work by young Central Asian artists to Frieze’s London exhibition space, No. 9 Cork Street. It’s just one vibration from an arts boom transforming the region. A slew of high-profile openings and events there this season include two private ventures in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s cultural lodestar: the Almaty Museum of Arts and the Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture (CCC). Meanwhile, in Uzbekistan, the government-backed Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) has opened in its capital city, Tashkent, alongside a major new biennial in the historic Silk Roads stop of Bukhara.

For Payam Sharifi of Slavs and Tatars, the regional specifics of Central Asia –which officially includes the republics of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan but stretches further culturally – make it particularly relevant on the contemporary global stage. ‘The idea of being in-between identities is very important,’ Sharifi says. ‘The borders

between these countries are so artificial, drawn by hand by Stalin 70 years ago. There are many faiths, including shamanic ones, and all Central Asian artists speak two or three languages.’

According to Sharifi, the young guns showcased in this exhibition have a different outlook to the first wave of Central Asian artists who emerged in the early 2000s, such as acclaimed video artist Almagul Menlibayeva or conceptualist Erbossyn Meldibekov. ‘This new generation want to move beyond the “post-Soviet” epithet,’ he says. Rather, ‘they share an interest in ritualistic or craft traditions, but with a contemporaneity and sharpness to how one revisits one’s past.’ Madina Joldybek, for example, makes textile works in which maternal breasts bloom, addressing the creative challenges of art-making and motherhood. Nazilya Nagimova uses wool-felting techniques inspired by those of the ancient nomadic Tartars to fashion giant butterflies, exploring issues of ecological fragility.

After what Sharifi describes as a ‘lost period’ between generations, with little

Above Akhmat Bikanov, Harvesting Memories 2024. Courtesy: the artist and Artwin Gallery, London

Opposite page from top Almaty Museum of Arts, 2025. Photo: Alexey Poptsov. Courtesy: Almaty Museum of Arts

Centre for Contemporary Arts, Tashkent. Render: Studio KO. Courtesy: Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation

Tselinny Centre of Contemporary Culture, 2025. Courtesy: © Asif Khan Studio and Tselinny Centre of Contemporary Culture

happening beyond grass-roots ventures, Central Asia’s two most powerful countries are supercharging their art ecosystems with distinctly different approaches. In Almaty, it is independent patrons developing opportunities for artists and nurturing fresh audiences. Founded by businessman Kairat Boranbayev in 2018, the Tselinny CCC’s activities have previously included publishing and a ‘scholar in residence’ programme. Its director, Jama Nurkalieva, explains that ‘a major goal for us was to reflect on years of blank history after the Soviet regime was gone, when our national identity wasn’t clear’.

Looking to Central Asia’s nomadic traditions of music and storytelling, Tselinny CCC’s new permanent space, developed by British architect Asif Khan in a former Soviet-era cinema, will be a platform for multiple mediums, including its Korkut Sonic Arts Triennale, the second edition of which will be held in 2026. The opening exhibitions at the venue riff on the myth of Nurtole, a supernatural figure who banished snakes by playing his kobyz (a kind of stringed instrument). Musical performances by the experimen-

tal collective qazaq indie will take place within an exhibition of work by Dariya Temirkhan and Gulnur Mukazhanova. ‘They’re reinterpreting the idea of coming back home,’ says Nurkalieva.

Inga Lāce, chief curator at the new Almaty Museum of Arts, underlines its role in developing audiences, introducing ‘contemporary art, global art histories and artists to a wider public’. It houses 700 works by Central Asian artists from the collection of its founder, Nurlan Smagulov, shown alongside international heavy-hitters, including Alicja Kwade, Jaume Plensa and Yinka Shonibare, who has a new outdoor sculpture commission. Strengthening its European connections, it plans symposiums with London’s Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Lāce’s opening exhibition, ‘Qonaqtar’ (‘guests’ in Kazakh), draws from the collection to tell the story of the region’s recent art history, beginning with those who emerged during Nikita Khrushchev’s post-Stalin thaw, like Aisha Galimbayeva, Kazakhstan’s first professionally trained woman artist, who was also a film costume

designer and archivist of national dress, and whose paintings explore the stages and roles of women’s lives. Contemporary names include Kyrgyz artist Chingiz Aidarov, whose video Snail (Spiral) (2021) sees him push a roll of migrant workers’ sewn-together mattresses through a Moscow suburb.

In Uzbekistan, the Tashkent CCA and Bukhara Biennial are just two initiatives |in a huge government-led programme of cultural renewal aimed at expanding the country’s arts industry, affirming its heritage and boosting its presence abroad as it assumes a more significant role in global trade. Gayane Umerova, chairperson of the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF), has overseen the development of the CCA by French architecture Studio KO in a 1912 diesel generating station that once powered the city’s trams. She has commissioned the new biennial, led the first Aral Culture Summit in the spring of 2025 and, since 2021, has commissioned the Uzbekistan pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Having begun with residencies for international artists last year, the Tashkent CCA will soon announce its exhibition and education programme to ‘reinforce Uzbek culture and potential’, Umerova explains. She reflects that there was little understanding locally of what contemporary art could be when the ACDF began its work eight years ago. ‘Our art education was very academic,’ she says. ‘It was about creating with your hands. The younger generation wanted to work in a multidisciplinary way. We’re trying to change the stigma around this.’

This year’s inaugural Bukhara Biennial, ‘Recipes for Broken Hearts’, is, in this sense, a clarion call. Themed around hospitality, it features collaborations between local chefs and craftspeople with international names and homegrown talents. The famed Uzbek chef Pavel Georganov has worked on separate culinary projects with art superstars Subodh Gupta and Carsten Höller. Slavs and Tatars have teamed up with ceramicist Abdullo Narzullaev on an installation exploring the divine gift of the melon. Younger Uzbek artists include the London-based Aziza Kadyri, who is creating work for her home country for the first time.

‘Bukhara is historically a place of pilgrimage and trade with different cultures,’ says Umerova. ‘It has the biggest number of artisans across different fields. The biennial isn’t just about Central Asia, but the Global South. We work with the Middle East, China, Japan and Korea. It’s a great moment for us to embrace that.’

For Sharifi, what makes Central Asian art so current and so compelling is its deeply embedded concerns. ‘Unlike in the urbanized West,’ he says, ‘questions of environmental fragility have been part of society [here] spiritually and intellectually for hundreds of years, be it living on the steppe or the disappearance of the Aral Sea. This is not a recent awakening. It doesn’t feel forced. It’s not a trend.’

‘To everything spurn, spurn, spurn’ is on view at No.9 Cork St, London, until 25 October 2025.

Bukhara Biennial, ‘Recipes for Broken Hearts’, is on view until 20 November 2025.

‘Barsakelmes’ is on view at Tselinny Center for Contemporary Culture, Almaty, until 7 December 2025.

‘Qonaqtar’ is on view at Almaty Museum of Arts until Summer 2026.

Skye Sherwin is a writer. She lives in Rochester, UK.

How ideas of Islamic hospitality and an ‘elevation of the ordinary’ shape Mohammed Z. Rahman’s commission for the Frieze Week cover: a love letter to London’s East End

LIFE IS SWEET

Mohammed Z. Rahman’s practice is defined by tender representations of the familiar and inviting: food, family, home, community. They are not presented as simple comforts, but as sites of warmth and intimacy entwined with the weighty political structures inscribed within them.

While studying social anthropology at SOAS in London, Rahman came across ethnographic studies of the East End’s Bangladeshi presence. Being born and raised in this community, they were intrigued by these distanced academic attempts to capture their family’s lives. Growing up in London and having access to the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Museum and the National Gallery, Rahman reflects on the experience of accessing one’s own culture through contested artefacts tucked away behind museum glass; the persistent experience of being other, of having your story told for you. ‘My practice stemmed from wanting to make all this accessible,’ they explain, ‘to tell it from my perspective, bring it out of these spaces.’

From this desire grew a practice, spanning painting, sculpture and illustration, in which depictions of everyday life, ordinary objects and domestic space trace ‘connections between personal and collective histories’. ‘History is made in the home,’ Rahman tells me as we look at their study for At Home (2025), a new permanent public mural commissioned by Peer and produced with the gallery’s Ambassadors, a group of young people aged 17 to 25 living in the east London boroughs of Hackney and Tower Hamlets. ‘Our day-to-day lives are where politics play out.’

Gracing the side of a residential building on the Arden Estate on Hoxton Street, the work takes influence from the history of public murals across east London, such as the 1984 Greater London Council’s Ethnic Minorities Unit campaign ‘London Against Racism’. Described by the artist as an ‘imagined cross-section of the building’, the painting comprises six richly detailed vignettes of domestic interiors. ‘The young people wanted to talk about anti-racism today and reflect on how insidious and embedded it is in their daily lives,’ Rahman explains. The group spoke of home as a place to shelter, seek safety and ‘conjure hope’, but also as a contested and politicized space buckling under the weight of cost-of-living and housing crises.

Sitting also between comfort and crisis, food recurs in Rahman’s work as a motif to map the personal onto the political. A new painting, Crumble, is a mise en scène of a well-attended family dinner party in progress. Food, plates and people flow from kitchen to dining table. The work was included in Rahman’s presentation earlier this year in London at the Whitechapel Gallery, ‘Hearthside’, which they described as a meditation on ‘Islamic hospitality and generosity’, embodied food knowledge and the ‘power of the dinner table to foster solidarities’ amid growing food scarcity and deepening class divides.

Citing Laisul Hoque’s ‘An Ode to All the Flavours’, a day-long exhibition also held at the Whitechapel in 2024, they discuss confectionery as a gateway to exploring childhood and place, echoing Hoque’s early memories of eating snacks with his father and his collaborations with local Bengali sweetshops: food as an expression of love, intimacy and shared cultural memory.

Confection (2025), commissioned for the cover of this issue of Frieze Week for the London 2025 fair, is a culmination of Rahman’s ongoing research and a return to their signature matchbox paintings. Encapsulating their fervour for the ‘elevation of the ordinary’, they are interested in the matchbox as a familiar and ubiquitous object, but one that also holds potential for danger and destruction. Drawing on the rich traditions of miniature painting, the artist seeks to create intimacy with the viewer: ‘People have to come close and listen with their eyes.’

Taken together, the paintings act as a ‘love letter’ to the East End, celebrating food as a medium of ‘inter-diasporic kinship and solidarity’. A sweet handesh evokes the conviviality of the local Bengali diaspora, while baklava pays homage to the long-standing Turkish and MENA communities. An apple slice from Beigel Bake, Mohammed’s favourite, nods to the culinary footprint of the Ashkenazi Jewish community. The rich sweetness of Supermalt signals the area’s Afro-Caribbean presence, while KA Black Grape Soda connotes the corner shop as a site of cultural convergence. The Fab ice lolly recalls summer on the council estate, paying gentle tribute to white working-class neighbourhoods and, from the aisles of Loon Fung Asian supermarket, mochi honours the East Asian population. Finally, a blackberry evokes foraging and Rahman’s interest in village culture in rural Bangladesh, where much of their family still resides. ‘It’s not necessarily something that is associated with innercity working-class communities,’ they say, ‘but I’m wondering what it would look like to forage and make do with what we’ve got.’