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Hello,
A good rule of thumb for any art magazine: never miss a chance to celebrate Joan Jonas. We’ve done so with this issue of frieze, in a feature interview between the artist and her long-time friend and colleague, Lynne Tillman. When Tillman asks Jonas whether she thinks of her major exhibition, now on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as a retrospective, the artist is adamantly opposed to the word: ‘I’d never do that. I’m calling it a survey because it’s not everything I’ve made.’ Much remains to be created and much – inevitably, perhaps, for an artist whose work partly depends on the ephemerality of performance and bodily movement – has been excluded.
That which cannot be documented easily is one theme that runs through this issue. Our columns go behind the scenes to look at the terms and conditions of art, those moments, whether in the studio or the institution, that most audiences rarely see. Ellen Mara de Wachter writes of the absences and holes that shape the meaning of London-based artist Kobby Adi’s work, Isabel Parkes pens a guide to preparing for a performance and Alastair Curtis delves into the archive of queer theatre to ask how it might be revived.
In the features section, Hettie Judah reveals the fortitude that undergirds the intimate work of Ghislaine Leung – an artist who leaves no trace of herself online – ahead of her major show at Kunsthalle Basel, which opens this month. Filmmaker and writer Gary Zhexi Zhang chases after the little-known revolutionary Ali Sultan Issa for a film about Afro-Asian solidarities. While Thomas J. Lax, Rodney McMillian and Zoé Whitley celebrate the Studio Museum in Harlem, on the eve of its reopening, with a dossier of texts that consider the institution as an inspirational place for chance encounters and unplanned conversations. Magazines such as this one are always striving to capture the present moment; this issue reminds us how much life must be lived outside the studio before any work of art can be created.
Best,
Andrew Durbin
Editor-in-Chief, frieze
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