Frieze New York 2023

ruby onyinyechi amanze

amanze’s creative practices and processes focus on producing mixed media, paper-based drawings and works. Her art draws inspiration from photography, textiles, architecture and print-making.

amanze’s practice builds around questions of how to create drawings that maintain paper’s essence of weightlessness. The large-scaled and multi-dimensional drawings are part of an ongoing, yet non-linear narrative that employ the malleability of space as the primary antagonist.

A nameless, self-imagined, chimeric universe has simultaneously been positioned between nowhere and everywhere. Using a limited palette of visual elements, including ada the Alien, windows and birds, amanze’s drawings create a non-narrative and expansive world. The construction of this world is largely centered around an interest in the spatial negotiations found in the three dimensional practices of dance, architecture and design.

GHADA AMER

Amer’s wide-ranging practice spans painting, cast sculpture, ceramics, works on paper, and garden and mixed-media installations. Recognising both that women are taught to model behaviors and traits shaped by others, and that art history and the history of painting in particular are shaped largely by expressions of masculinity, Amer’s work actively subverts these frameworks through both aesthetics and content. Her practice explores the complicated nature of identity as it is developed through cultural and religious norms as well as personal longings and understandings of the self.

DAVID GOLDBLATT

David Goldblatt was born in Randfontein, a small mining town outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. Through his lens, chronicled the people, structures and landscapes of his country from 1948, through the rise of Afrikaner Nationalism, the apartheid regime and into the democratic era - until his death in June, 2018.  In particular, Goldblatt documented the people, landscapes and industry of the Witwatersrand, the resource-rich area in which he grew up and lived, where the local economy was based chiefly on mining. In general, Goldblatt’s subject matter spanned the whole of the country geographically and politically from sweeping landscapes of the Karoo desert, to the arduous commutes of migrant black workers, forced to live in racially segregated areas. His broadest series, which spans six decades of photography, examines how South Africans have expressed their values through the structures, physical and ideological, that they have built.

DOR GUEZ

Dor Guez’s new series of prints, titled Amid Imperial Grids (2022), presents manipulated negative images of the first modern maps of Palestine dating back to 1885. Based on these maps, two geographical grids were established at the beginning of the 20th century: “The British Palestine Grid” and “The French Levant Grid”, divided on the map by a thick pink line. Guez removes any human markers from the maps that categorise the landscape, including names of roads, towns, borders, villages, cities, mountains, and valleys.

REMY JUNGERMAN

In his work, Jungerman explores the intersection of pattern and symbol in Surinamese Maroon culture, the larger African diaspora, and 20th century Modernism. He places fragments of Maroon textiles and other materials found in the African diaspora—the kaolin clay used in several religious traditions or the nails featured in Nkisi Nkondi power sculpture—in direct contact with materials and imagery drawn from more “established” art traditions. Jungerman, therefore, presents a peripheral vision that both enriches and informs our perspective on art history.

Exploring and championing a breadth of mediums, such as animation, sculpture, performance and drawing, William Kentridge’s complex creations are multifaceted in form, resonating with audiences through their unifying exploration of the very fabric of our existence. Revisiting and reacting to philosophical, historical or political tropes, he conjures myriad themes in his polymorphic works which are experimental and conceptually rich.

Pour forms part of an accumulation of elemental symbols within Kentridge’s broader practice. This series of bronze sculptures functions as a form of visual dictionary. The sculptures are symbols and ‘glyphs’, a repertoire of everyday objects or suggested words and icons, many of which have been used repeatedly across previous projects. The glyphs can be arranged to construct sculptural sentences and rearranged to deny meaning.

“The glyphs started as a collection of ink drawings and paper cut-outs, each on a single page from a dictionary. Previously I had taken a drawing or silhouette and given it just enough body to stand on its own feet - paper, added to cardboard and put on a stand. With the glyphs, I wanted a silhouette with the weight that the shape suggested. A shape not just balancing in space, but filling space. Something to hold in your hand, with both shape and heft.” - William Kentridge

MISHECK MASAMVU

Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, Masamvu’s works allow him to address the past while searching for a way of being in the world. His layered painted surfaces and brushstrokes, which are almost visceral, exist as remnants of the physical act of painting and give the sense that multiple temporalities have been included in one picture plane. As one of the most significant and pioneering contemporary artists from Zimbabwe, Masamvu’s work offers renewed understandings on visual culture in Africa and the decolonial project more broadly – inciting a fresh critical perspective that bears witness to the political realities, social textures and divergent voices present on the continent.

SHIRIN NESHAT

Shirin Neshat’s photographic series Women of Allah examines the complexities of women’s identities, both through their personal and public lives. The series also explores notions of femininity in relation to Islamic fundamentalism and militancy in her home country of Iran. This is done both through the lens of Western representations of Muslim women and through the more intimate subject of personal and religious conviction.

This particular image was one of only a few taken by Neshat in Iran during one of her last trips. She was inspired by photographs from the Qajar period, which tended to have similar backdrops.

SUE WILLIAMSON

Sue Williamson’s newest series of work, Stories for Children reflect the pages and the illustrations in a colouring in book bought from the gift shop of the Anglo-Boer War Museum in Bloemfontein, South Africa.

The embroideries of the Stories for Children series reflect the book's attempts to explain to a child the horrors of this war between the British and the Boer republics (1899-1902).

In a large wall work dating from 1990, Colouring In, Williamson combined the pages of the book with archival photographs from the time, contrasting the treatment of the Boers by the British with the treatment of black people in South Africa by the Afrikaans government.

Colouring in is currently on exhibition at The Box Museum in Plymouth, UK as part of a solo show of the artist's work titled 'Between Memory and Forgetting'. The centrepiece of the exhibition is a new work commissioned by The Box which considers the irony of two obelisks, one in Plymouth and one in Bloemfontein, both memorialising the Anglo Boer War. The Plymouth obelisk recalls the British soldiers who died in battle, and the Bloemfontein obelisk, memorialises the women and children who died in the camps. The new work carries the words from the Plymouth Hoe memorial: TOWARDS ANOTHER WORLD.

Williamson is also currently on a major international solo exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, Tell Me What You Remember, with Lebohang Kganye, and a solo exhibition titled Other Voices, Other Cities opens in late July at the Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas.

Thomas’s lenticulars I am You / I Am Joy (2023) and I am. Am I? AM I? I Am (2023) see a direct interaction with Ringgold’s set of collages from the 1970s. Her collages include phrases that speak to Black feminist sentiments borne out of her personal experiences. Thomas borrows Ringgold’s typographic aesthetic and layout to speak to ideas around identity in a contemporary context. The lenticulars also reference the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike, specifically the posters declaring “I AM A MAN.” These works, through the nature of their material, force viewers to look again, mirroring the artist’s revisiting of this historical moment and protest art more generally.