Issue 205
September 2019

The September issue of frieze considers the role of food – aesthetically, sensorially, politically – in contemporary culture, and the human and environmental costs of its cultivation and supply. Writers Chloe Aridjis, Fernando A. Flores, Diana Hamilton, Alexandra Kleeman and Madeleine Thien reflect on our relationship with food through the five senses. Nine contemporary artists, including Olafur Eliasson, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Otobong Nkanga and Heather Phillipson have produced new ‘recipes’ for our cookbook. And Jane Black profiles artist duo Cooking Sections and their long-term investigations into the ethical and political systems that underpin what and how we eat.

Plus, 41 reviews from around the world, including two major exhibitions by the pioneering German artist Rebecca Horn at Centre Pompidou-Metz, France, and Museum Tinguely, Switzerland, and Luc Tuymans’s four-decade retrospective in Venice. And answering our questionnaire is Allen Ruppersberg, whose conceptual restaurant, Al’s Café (1969), served such delicacies as ‘three rocks with crumpled paper wad’ and ‘simulated burned pine needles à la Johnny Cash.’

Cover image: Christopher Knowles, Cheddar House and Bacon Hamburger (detail), 2019, marker on two sheets of paper, 22 x 28 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York

From this issue

Food is personal, and so is this issue – the first of frieze to focus on food’s aesthetic, sensorial, political and environmental role in contemporary culture

BY Andrew Durbin AND Evan Moffitt | 23 AUG 19

Specially commissioned recipes by nine artists, including Otobong Nkanga, Heather Phillipson and Rirkrit Tiravanija, ranging from abstract to delectable 

23 AUG 19

The art world’s dining rituals reinforce its class barriers – which is why we should value the museum coffee

BY Dan Fox | 23 AUG 19

From Louis XIV to #foodporn, feasting has always been for the eyes

BY Fanny Singer | 22 AUG 19

How dystopian literature influenced the meal replacement industry

BY Chris Fite-Wassilak | 22 AUG 19

Jesse Connuck on works by Congolese Plantation Workers Art League & Renzo Martens, Torolab and Annalee Davis

BY Jesse Connuck | 22 AUG 19

The lumbung, or rice barn, sets the stage for the group’s documenta opening in 2022

BY Ruangrupa | 19 AUG 19

‘The past must be enriched’: An interview with leading French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre

‘We are being poisoned because we have been severed from who we are’

BY Jennifer Higgie | 19 AUG 19

Reckoning with the legacy of Jim Harrison, whose writing portrayed women like meals – meant to give pleasure and comfort, without having any hunger themselves

BY Julia Langbein | 18 AUG 19

Ahead of her retrospective at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, the artist speaks to contributing editor Fernanda Brenner about the themes of hunger and hybridity in her work

BY Fernanda Brenner | 18 AUG 19

Artist Dena Yago on food, affect and the Silicon Valley workplace

BY Dena Yago | 17 AUG 19

Q. What would we find in your fridge? A. Shipwreck casserole and sailor’s duff

BY Allen Ruppersberg | 16 AUG 19

The artist reflects on the natural organisms and systems that have inspired his work at Salmon Creek Farm

BY Fritz Haeg | 16 AUG 19

From climate-resistant menus to colonial desserts, Cooking Sections ask us to think again about the ethics and economics of the food on our plates

BY Jane Black | 15 AUG 19

‘Queer Spaces’ at Whitechapel Gallery documents the disappearance of many of London’s LGBTQ+ venues

BY Juliet Jacques | 14 AUG 19

At Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Simon’s art is a prescient critique of art-making itself

BY Pablo Larios | 13 AUG 19

In Rezaire’s work, prehistoric West African landmarks stand for enigmas of the past and future

BY Kadish Morris | 12 AUG 19

Considering our scripted future at Helsinki Contemporary 

BY Tom Jeffreys | 10 AUG 19

The artist’s montages, at David Lewis, New York, are elegant but cryptic reflections on belonging and complicity

BY Mitch Speed | 24 JUL 19

The works on paper at Parker Gallery, in Los Angeles, ‘encounter memories, fantasies and dream images along the way’

BY Jonathan Griffin | 23 JUL 19

At the Met Breuer, a winding path guides viewers through the late artist’s seductive, organic sculptures 

BY Sophie Kovel | 23 JUL 19

The artist’s witty, immersive retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario broaches basketball, Indigenous culture and gay desire 

BY Charles Reeve | 19 JUL 19

A group exhibition at ACCA, Melbourne, ‘pulls back the skin on suffering and selfhood’

BY Sophie Knezic | 17 JUL 19

In the French artist’s evocative exhibition at Marcelle Alix, Paris, blind spots transform into vantage points

BY Yelena Moskovich | 11 JUL 19

A new show at Richard Saltoun begs the question – how effective is self-inflicted violence?

BY Izabella Scott | 08 JUL 19

At Singapore’s Yeo Workshop, the artist unsettles the image of Southeast Asia as a tropical getaway

BY Wong Bing Hao | 05 JUL 19

As her retrospective at MAXXI in Rome attests, the late Italian artist believed in the power of the imagination to save lives 

BY Ana Vukadin | 05 JUL 19

At Museo Jumex, Mexico City, the father of the readymade gets overshadowed by bluster

BY Fanny Singer | 03 JUL 19

The artist’s new series of paintings at Berlin’s Galerie Barbara Weiss unseats our fantasies of concealment

BY Greg Nissan | 28 JUN 19

The triumphant virtuosity of Euler’s latest paintings at Berlin’s Galerie Neu

BY Kirsty Bell | 27 JUN 19

At The Drawing Center, New York, artists and writers envision a world free of racism, sexism, colonialism and homophobia

BY Megan N. Liberty | 26 JUN 19

Two riveting shows, at Centre Pompidou-Metz and Basel’s Museum Tinguely, showcase the 75-year-old German artist’s ingenious capacity for invention

BY Jane Ure-Smith | 25 JUN 19

At Richard Gray Gallery, sociological statistics meet medieval sculpture in a powerful commentary on black life in the US 

BY Joel Kuennen | 21 JUN 19

‘The Construction of the Possible’ is the uneven result of a clash between artists and the Cuban government

BY Amy Zion | 20 JUN 19

‘Água Viva’ is a vision of a run-down and resource-scarce future

BY Dan Fox | 19 JUN 19

The Black female gaze shines resiliently through the stormy surfaces of the artist’s paintings on view at Hauser & Wirth

BY Rebecca Rose Cuomo | 18 JUN 19

With over 100 works, ‘Straying from the Line’ brings together superb work under the rubric of anti-essentialism

BY Mitch Speed | 18 JUN 19

Spread across four German cities, this year’s ‘Ruhr Ding’ explores art in public space in a former industrial region

BY Carina Bukuts | 18 JUN 19

From her kitchen table in Canterbury, the Australian curator quietly reinvented the exhibition format

BY Philomena Epps | 17 JUN 19

In his first show at Callicoon Fine Arts in New York, the artist probes the ways we use – and abuse – objects  

BY Shiv Kotecha | 14 JUN 19

Their latest show at Kölnischer Kunstverein sees the post-conceptual duo bite into the exclusionary social realities of art making

BY Stanton Taylor | 14 JUN 19

At Kolkata’s Experimenter, the collective find coincidence and contradiction in the archive of The Hindu newspaper

BY Skye Arundhati Thomas | 14 JUN 19

A survey of the artist’s paintings and sculptures at Chicago’s Kavi Gupta skewers drug companies’ marketing tactics in the midst of the US opioid crisis

BY B. David Zarley | 12 JUN 19

Kasper reflects on a world in which everyone is a critic, every space a studio

BY Sarah E. James | 11 JUN 19

At once elegiac and angry, a new show of paintings illuminates the filmmaker’s ambivalent relationship with religion

BY Daniel Culpan | 10 JUN 19

At the Brooklyn Museum, a landmark exhibition of never-before-seen photographs captures a rich spectrum of postwar American life

BY Ian Bourland | 07 JUN 19

For her show in Grand-Hornu, the artist delves into the Mundaneum, a 19th-century utopian project to classify all human knowledge

BY Hettie Judah | 07 JUN 19

In her solo show at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in New York, the artist’s precision leaves all possible disorder to signification

BY Diana Hamilton | 05 JUN 19

A group show at SOAS, London, explores the complex, often violent, cultural legacies that have shaped the country 

BY Cleo Roberts | 04 JUN 19

At Hive, Beijing, Yu Linhan’s abstract representations of medical equipment are unsettling and beautiful

BY Nooshfar Afnan | 31 MAY 19

A two-part survey of the artist’s work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts foregrounds dialogue as a radical political act

BY Liz Hirsch | 31 MAY 19

The painter’s first European retrospective since the 1960s finally allows her to step out of Jackson Pollock’s shadow

BY Phoebe Cripps | 31 MAY 19

At Bombas Gens, Valencia, a retrospective of the terrestrial geographies of the overlooked painter

BY Max Andrews | 29 MAY 19

A new exhibition at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery feels at once reminiscent and foreboding

BY Aurella Yussuf | 20 MAY 19

More than 80 works from four decades mine the tension between beauty and horror

BY Hili Perlson | 16 MAY 19