Frieze London

For this year's edition of Frieze London, James Cohan will present a selection of new and important work by Firelei Báez, Gauri Gill, Teresa Margolles, Josiah McElheny, Christopher Myers, Jordan Nassar, Naudline Pierre, Yinka Shonibare CBE,  Elias Sime, Fred Tomaselli and Grace Weaver. Concurrently, for the inaugural Frieze No.9 Cork St, James Cohan will present a solo exhibition of work by Christopher Myers entitled I Dare Not Appear, on view from October 7 through October 23.  

In advance of the fair, preview a selection of available works.

Pistas de Baile is a photographic series by Teresa Margolles that depicts trans sex workers standing in the ruins of demolished nightclubs in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Each subject poses on the last remaining fragment of a dance floor where they once worked: a site of convergence between labor, eroticism, and violence. Since the introduction of NAFTA in the 1990s, Margolles has worked closely with at-risk communities in Ciudad Juárez, a border city whose economic proximity to the U.S. has ushered in decades of conflict due to organized crime. In recent years, the city council has demolished hundreds of bars and nightclubs within its historic center, hoping to encourage tourism and construct a ‘new face’ for the neighborhood. Separated from public life by social and institutional mechanisms, the trans community in Ciudad Juárez lacks access to systems of social care and is particularly vulnerable to crime. Having relied on clubs and bars for protection, the systematic demolition of these spaces has exposed these individuals to brutality, police harassment, and murder.

the soft afternoon air as you hold us all in a single death (To breathe full and Free: a declaration, a re-visioning, a correction) is a multi-element installation consisting of 81 works on archival maps and book pages. Báez has long painted directly onto historical material, such as found maps, manuals, and travelogues, layering figures over them to imagine new modes of understanding inherited stories. Here, she intervenes onto printed matter culled from widely varying sources that, together, underscore streams of influence amongst interrelated histories of black independence and progress—in the Caribbean, the Americas, and globally. Taking multiple, colorful collaged forms, women are represented prominently in Báez's work as change-making protagonists who intervene onto the pages and confront the formation of history, exposing the flimsiness of hierarchies that privilege certain narratives over others. Yoruba mythology is invoked through symbolic cues such as eleke beads and symbolic shifts in palette likening the figures to Orishas, interweaving diasporic narratives from the past with the present. In its collective display, the panels and their subjects envision a future of resistance and reclamation.

This work was exhibited at the 2021 Artes Mundi 9 exhibition at the National Museum Cardiff in Wales. 

In 2015, artist Gauri Gill began collaborating with papier-mâché artists of the Kokna and Warli tribes in Maharashtra, renowned for their sacred masks.  In this series Acts of Appearance, she invited her collaborators to go beyond the confines of their traditional mask making and develop a new set of forms. 

Through these vibrant color photographs, Gill tells fictional stories improvised with her collaborator-subjects as they engage in everyday village activities while inhabiting new masks, recalling animals, humans and revered objects that they made expressly for this body of work. The resulting images vacillate between reality and otherworldliness, unfolding in a range of symbolic and sometimes playful scenarios all situated within the backdrop of the surrounding village.