An Expanded Field With Performances and a New App, Frieze Sculpture Branches Out
Frieze Sculpture is on the cusp of its teenage years. Now 12 years old, the playful, rebellious outdoor exhibition returns to The Regent’s Park to showcase 22 artists from across five continents. As usual, Frieze Sculpture this year comprises a careful juxtaposition of old and new, historical and contemporary; artists include Anna Boghiguian, Leonora Carrington, Theaster Gates, Frances Goodman and Yoshitomo Nara. For the first time, Frieze Sculpture is supported by Bloomberg Connects. As Official Digital Guide, the Bloomberg Connects app will allow a global audience to engage with the display.
Unique content on the app includes an exclusive audio tour with curator Fatoş Üstek and introductions from all participating artists as well as an interactive map and video content with exhibiting artists, including İnci Eviner, Fani Parali and Kirstine Roepstorff.
Following on from last year’s ‘expanded notion of sculpture’, for 2024 Üstek has selected artists whose practices bleed across media and genres, expanding into sound, light and augmented reality. This year’s exhibition sees new commissions, works in diverse materials (including performance) and a weekly programme of events. Some artists, like Libby Heaney, are exhibiting their first public sculptures. Heaney’s Ent- (nonearthly delights) (2024) is inspired by her background in quantum computing and comprises two AR experiences; it builds on a previous iteration of the project in which the artist used self-written quantum code to animate her paintings and creatures, inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1503–15). As the artist describes in her commentary on the Bloomberg Connects app, the sculpture imagines the ‘new, Frankenstein lifeforms’ that quantum computing might create; the use of the gold in the sculpture refers to ‘the mate r iality’ of quantum computing.
With a theme of ‘play’, Üstek has selected artists whose work can be ‘playful’ but also plays with sculpture as concept
and material. Albano Hernández, for example, has painted onto the grass a life-size silhouette of one of the sweetgum trees in The Regent’s Park, creating a permanent shadow. The natural environ ment of the park itself is a collaborator in the artwork. Performance, too, stretches the scope of sculpture, with the park becoming a stage. Interdisciplinary artist FOS will be performing a sculptural work called FREEZE, while Parali’s AONYX and DREPAN (2020), two great steel armatures, will be activated by performers Sophie Brain and Rachel Porter. This spiritual piece sees the ghostly performers ‘sing’ to each other in a heady mix of prose and brutish growls and howls, lipsyncing to pre-recorded sound. As Parali explains, ‘the performers then become like channels, like mediums for these voices’. The guttural sounds transcend the present moment, lingering beyond the boundaries of performance and park.
Üstek also hopes that the artworks will play with one another. Carrington’s bronze sculptures of mythical figures El Bailarín (2011) and La Inventora del Atole (2011), and Woody De Othello’s colourful glazed works of everyday objects are not an obvious pairing, and yet the energy of fantasy and surrealism pulses between them. Other highlights include Hans Josephsohn’s Untitled (2005) – a reclining sculpted female figure evoking prehistory, as if fresh from an archaeologist’s dig. However, upon closer inspection, the dynamism and way in which Josephsohn moved between figuration and abstraction become apparent. The artist used plaster, a material easy to rework and patch up, his unusual strokes forming gashes, ridges and bulges, before eventually being cast in brass.
Other artists particularly interested in the body include Zanele Muholi. The South African artist’s self-portrait Bambatha I (2023) sees them constricted by a brassy, golden snake-like tubing slithering around their body, leaving just face and hands free. The work references gender-based violence as well as the
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Bloomberg Connects app at Frieze Sculpture 2024 with Libby Heaney, Ent- (non-earthly delights) 2024. Photograph: Linda Nylind
Bloomberg Connects is the Official Digital Guide for Frieze Sculpture. A free digital guide to c ultural organizations around the world, Bloomberg Connects makes it easy to access and engage with hundreds of participating arts and culture spaces from mobile devices, anytime, anywhere. As Official Digital Guide f or Frieze Sculpture, the Bloomberg Connects app offers 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 Official Digital Guide for Frieze Sculpture, scan the QR code below:
artist’s personal struggles with uterine fibroids and gender dysphoria. These intimate, personal experiences are amplified in this very public setting.
Such instances of sculpture connect ing the public sphere with personal experience echoes the mission of Bloomberg Connects, which aims to bring the collec t ions of lofty cultural spaces – from major museums to libraries and botanic gardens – into the hands of individual users across the globe.
I n the same way, Frieze Sculpture invites us beyond the white walls of the gallery or fair and, in so doing, raises possibilities for exciting, experimental work that contrasts and collaborates with its outdoor surroundings.
Vaishna Surjid is a writer and curator. She lives in London, UK.
