Frieze #258

‘I’m offering diagnoses for things that are otherwise unexplainable.’
—Aki Sasamoto

For the April issue of frieze magazine, Aki Sasamoto speaks to researcher Jessica Kwok about improvisation, experimentation and the translation of lived experience into performance. Plus, Lou Stoppard profiles artist Veronica Ryan in honour of her extensive exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery, London.

INTERVIEW: AKI SASAMOTO

‘The work is deeply connected to self-discovery and to questions of identity politics.’ On the occasion of her first UK institutional solo at Studio Voltaire, London, Aki Sasamoto unpacks a practice grounded in lived systems and subtle politics.

PROFILE: VERONICA RYAN

‘I feel as though I’m an observer, rather than putting out a specific viewpoint.’ The artist reflects on life’s porosity and how objects are impacted and changed by what surrounds them.

ALSO FEATURING

Ravi Ghosh pens a thematic essay on contemporary photography’s turn toward family archives as sites of absence, memory and historical repair. In ‘1,500 Words’, editor-in-chief Andrew Durbin recalls his snowbound visit to Ann Wilson in Valatie, New York, while researching his book on Paul Thek and Peter Hujar. Plus, a roundtable dedicated to four galleries to watch in Milan.

COLUMNS: LABOUR

Ellen Mara De Wachter considers Racheal Crowther’s use of scent and space to reveal corporate and state control. Bailey Trela outlines how Michael Rakowitz’s project ‘The invisible enemy should not exist’ (2007-ongoing) reimagines devastated archaeological ruins. Andreas Petrossiants charts Italian cultural workers mobilizing art, mutual aid and collective action. Tom Lordan examines Ireland’s humane and successful Basic Income for the Arts pilot, which addressed chronic precarity in artistic labour. Christopher Alessandrini reviews how the exhibition ‘Performing Conditions: Artistic Labor and Dependency as Form’ at MIT List Visual Arts Center reframes the terms of artmaking today.

Finally, Christina Catherine Martinez responds to The Inside Job (1992) by Jutta Koether. Plus, Aki Sasamoto contributes to our series of artists’ ‘to-do’ lists, and senior editor Terence Trouillot pens a postcard from Brooklyn.