On View

The Frieze tent in London’s Regent’s Park has barely been disassembled and yet eyes have already shifted to Paris. This week, the French capital will welcome FIAC back to the Grand Palais Éphémère for the fair’s 47th edition, this year boasting 170 exhibitors. Elsewhere, the quirkier Paris Internationale will again set up shop in an intimate, residential building at 168 Avenue Victor Hugo, from where the smaller fair will continue its mission to champion emerging galleries.
Also participating in Paris Art Week are the city’s art institutions, a number of which are mounting a slew of high-caliber exhibitions, the quality of which is so laudable—so “must-see”—that you might even be up prompted to consider cutting fair time in favor of an old-fashioned museum excursion.
Here are seven you won’t want to miss.
“Ouverture” at Pinault Collection
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Vigil for a Horseman (2017). ©Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Exhibition view, “Ouverture”, Bourse de Commerce—Pinault Collection, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Pinault Collection. Photo by Aurélien Mole.
Still fresh from its May unveiling, the new Bourse de Commerce–Collection Pinault continues to bask in that undeniable sparkle of the new. Collector François Pinault’s long-awaited Parisian venture now proudly stands in the Les Halles district, occupying a historic building revitalized under the guidance of visionary architect Tadao Ando.
Celebrating the museum’s inauguration is “Ouverture,” an ambitious group presentation of 200 works by 32 artists, installed across all 10 exhibition spaces. Works by David Hammons, Cindy Sherman, Maurizio Cattelan, Sherrie Levine, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Antonio Obá, Urs Fischer, and Kerry James Marshall appear in a sprawling display where each artist on view is a heavyweight in their own right.
Pinault Collection, 2 rue de Viarmes, 75001 Paris; through December 31, 2021.
“Anne Imhof: Natures Mortes”at Palais de Tokyo
Anne Imhof, ROOM VI (2021). Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Buchholz and Sprüth Magers. Photo: Andrea Rossetti.
Demand for tickets to “experience” the German artist’s newest project has gotten so intense that Palais de Tokyo implemented nightly extended hours through the show’s close. (At the time of writing, only eight “exceptional” days remain.) In signature Imhof fashion, “Natures Mortes” is touted more as a spectacle than an exhibition, taking over the Parisian center’s entire space with “an all-embracing, polyphonic work” of music, painting, drawing, and, of course, performance.
The Golden Lion winner also invited a cast of 30 artist “accomplices” to participate in a mysterious team venture that involves fellow artists Oscar Murillo, Precious Okoyomon, Jutta Koether, and Wolfgang Tillmans.
Palais de Tokyo, 13 Avenue du Président Wilson, 75116 Paris; through October 24, 2021.
“Marlene Dumas: Le Spleen de Paris and Conversations”at Musée d’Orsay
Marlene Dumas, Hafid Bouazza (2020). Courtesy Marlene Dumas. Photo: © Peter Cox, Eindhoven.
In an ode to Baudelaire and his enduring influence, esteemed contemporary painter Marlene Dumas produced 15 new works born from a collaboration with the late author and translator Hafid Bouazza, and timed to the bicentenary of Baudelaire’s birth, in 1821. Poetry and literature are well-known factors that shape Dumas’s work, and this new series was inspired by the legendary French poet’s collection Le Spleen de Paris. Portraits of figures such as Baudelaire and artist Jean Duval are displayed alongside still lifes that respond to a poem, or contain image motifs, such as a rat or a bottle, referenced within the poetry collection.
Musée d’Orsay, Esplanade Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, 75007 Paris; through January 30, 2022.
‘Bonaventure (Trafficking worlds)’at Fondation d’Entreprise Pernod Ricard
“Bonaventure (Trafiquer les mondes).” Installation view, from left to right: Minia Biabiany, Meris Angioletti, Gina Folly. Photo: Thomas Lannes, 2021.
Curated by Lilou Vidal, this group exhibition—also known as the 22nd Pernod Ricard Foundation Prize show—brings together (you guessed it) the nominees currently up for the award, which since 1999 has been recognizing artists under 40. Themes of storytelling and the occult dominate this year’s iteration (its title, bonaventure, refers to the uncertainty and risk involved in fortune telling), with rising stars such as Tarek Lakhrissi and Gina Folly included in the lineup of nine participants.
Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard, 1 cours Paul Ricard, 75008 Paris; through October 30, 2021.
Martin Margielaat Lafayette Anticipations
© Martin Margiela.
Even though the trend of “fashion as art” has already peaked—and at this point is veering dangerously close to cliche—Lafayette Anticipations combats such associations head on by noting in the press text that Martin Margiela, founder of French fashion house Maison Margiela, “has always been an artist.”
Margiela is categorized here as an iconoclast, whose work across various media influenced his unbiased approach to material, providing him an attitude that regards a Caravaggio painting or a box of hair dye with equal significance. The show, organized by distinguished curator Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, is framed as a single artwork in itself, encompassing installations, sculptures, collages, paintings, and films, all being shown publicly for the first time in a “labyrinthine” setting.
Lafayette Anticipations, 9 rue du Plâtre, F-75004 Paris, October 20, 2021 – January 2, 2022.

“Bianca Bondi: The Daydream”at Fondation Louis Vuitton
Bianca Bondi, detail of The Daydream (2021). Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. © Adagp, Paris, 2021, © Fondation Louis Vuitton / Marc Domage.
For her first one-person museum outing in France, Bianca Bondi has erected an indoor garden which drew original influence from Mexican cenotes, a form of region-specific topography that is heavily steeped in myth. The artist’s multisensory installation is situated around a central well outfitted with synthetic lungs, or alveoli. The well serves as the site’s primary energy source, by which its lungs regularly emit a colored, fragrant saline solution that “nourishes” the vegetation, flowers, and creepy-crawlers dwelling on branches in this half-fake, half-natural ecosystem. Bondi, who was born in South Africa and now lives in Paris, is an artist to watch: She also has a concurrent solo show at Fondation Carmignac in Porquerolles, France, and is slated to participate in the 2022 Gwangju Biennale.
Fondation Louis Vuitton, 8 Avenue du Mahatma Gandhi Bois de Boulogne, 75116 Paris; through January 24, 2022.
Jean Claracqat Musée Eugène Delacroix
Jean Claracq, Working Class Hero (2021). Courtesy the artist and Galerie Sultana. Photo: Romain Darnaud.
As part of FIAC’s programming, the emerging painter Jean Claracq has debuted seven new paintings at Musée Delacroix. Created in direct response to two Delacroix works from the Old Master’s namesake permanent collection, Claracq’s compositions examine the tension inherent in contrasting perceptions. Produced in the artist’s typical small-scale format, these new paintings encourage a dialogue with those of Eugène Delacroix. Despite centuries of separation, Claracq possesses distinct similarities to the most influential artist of the French Romantic school, particularly in their shared attempts to capture an individual’s internal distress, especially as it may be influenced by a sense of helplessness in a chaotic world.
Musée Eugène Delacroix, 6 Rue de Furstemberg, 75006 Paris; through November 1, 2021.
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In the aftermath of Kara Walker’s monumental fountain, Carsten Holler’s playground of slides, and Olafur Eliasson’s unforgettable indoor weather project, I had certain expectations for Tate Modern’s latest Turbine Hall commission, which opened yesterday. But the U.S. artist Anicka Yi, who has been tapped for the annual project, has a more subtle flavor than her noisier predecessors.
A squeal of delight in the audience directed my attention upwards to the bridge across the cavernous room where a fleet of jellyfish-like balloons floated close to the ceiling. For her installation, Yi has invented these hybrid biological and technological creatures called aerobes, which are classified either as “xeno-jellies” whose forms have been inspired by ocean lifeforms or “planulae,” from different types of mushrooms.
Filled with helium and propelled around the room by rotors, they look like they come from an alien planet but are more benign than H.G. Wells’s tripod creatures. As I drew closer, I realized that they were emitting a faintly pleasant aroma; one floated above me and performed a gentle twirl.
Installation view of Hyundai Commission Anicka Yi at Tate Modern, October 2021. Photo by Will Burrard Lucas.
The installation is rooted in the artist’s ongoing interest in shifting the relationship between technology, humans, and the biological world. It proposes a different kind of ecosystem: Her floating creatures imagine new ways that machines could inhabit the world alongside humans, rather than the traditional understanding that they function to serve humans, or work against us in some dystopian capacity.
“I wanted to open up that dialectic and expand the conversation;” Yi said in a press conference at the unveiling of the work. “Machines don’t necessarily have to serve us or scare us in order to coexist with us.”
Taking this idea as her starting point, Yi explained how she started to think about the concept of “wilding” machines; eliminating their functionality, and asking what it would look like to live with them then. Inspired by how organisms learn through their bodies and senses, as well as technological advances within the field of soft robotics, Yi endowed the aerobes with a sort of sensory intelligence. They respond to information, including the scents of the building, sources of heat, and an awareness of their place in space relative to each other. 
Once raised in the air, they are completely autonomous, driven by this artificial life program—a software that can be likened to the mind—that simulates and seeks to understand complex biological behaviors. Their unpredictable movements imbue them with a sense of life; the squeal of delight I had heard was a child reacting to them as animals and not machines.
Anicka Yi, “In Love With the World,” Hyundai Commission, Tate Modern. Photo by Joe Humphrys, courtesy Tate.
The sensorial element to the installation also resists the ability to be captured on Instagram. It has an evolving scentscape that you have to physically take into your body to experience, part of a genre that Yi called “metabolic” art. 
“You have to experience it in the radical present, in your body and mind as one,” she said. The changing odors emitted around the aerobes have been inspired by different eras of the surrounding Bankside area, from marine scents related to pre-human era to the spices thought to ward off the black death in the 14th century to smells from London’s industrial age.
The scents are subtle and offer up no clear illustrative associations. When I was there, there was was a faintly spicy, not unpleasant, smell of patchouli. When asked what was intended to evoke, Yi informed us wryly that the inspiration was cholera. It’s intentionally a surprise as Yi aims to expand our relationship to smell. We expect to instantly recognize something and categorize it as good or bad, but these confusing scents are not straightforward; they ask you to heighten your awareness, and breathe deeply.
“Yi has worked with smell and scent for a long time, and partly in terms of questioning the primacy of the visual, and the visual as principally male, rational, industrial, technocratic, and Western,”  the exhibition’s co-curator Achim Borchardt-Hume told Artnet News. “Whereas our experience of the world encompasses all the senses.”
Installation view of Hyundai Commission “Anicka Yi: In Love With the World” at Tate Modern, October 2021. Photo by Will Burrard Lucas.
The artist is also interested in the politics of air, in how scent can alter your perception of space, and make you aware of the air around you in ways that you weren’t before. Indeed, as I experience the same awareness of the odors and gasses in a room, and the potential risks they carry, I was instantly more aware that I was sharing the air with others.
“Engaging with the air, especially in the age of Covid, it’s an especially rich material to unpack,” Yi said. She wanted to foreground the olfactive questions with the pandemic and to really underscore the air that we’re sharing. Indeed, questions of how how we inhabit the world, climate emergency, and coexistence between humans and other species, have taken on a whole new importance over the past two years. Many people who got sick actually lost their sense of smell; I was one of them, and I don’t think I ever fully appreciated how crucial it was to my experience of the world—from determining if something was burning to recalling past experiences—until I lost it.
“Air is this charged site for social discourse, and with the pandemic and climate crisis it is this substrate that ties us all in this very symbiotic coexistence that we cannot escape,” she said. “We are all these vessels of interdependence and we have a responsibility toward each other.”
And that’s what the Turbine Hall commission has always done: brought people together. The show places Yi in dialogue with the works before her, such as Superflex’s three-man swings that required people to work together to enjoy them. So, too, does her work underscore how we—as either biological or technological entities—are all in this together.
“Anicka Yi: In Love With the World” is on view at Tate Modern through January 16.
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It’s Frieze week in London, and ahead of the fairs opening to VIPs tomorrow, here’s our pick of what’s on view beyond The Regent’s Park across a selection of galleries in London.

Elizabeth NeelPilar CorriasThrough October 23
Installation view, Elizabeth Neel, “Limb after Limb,” at Pilar Corrias. Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London.
In “Limb after Limb,” Elizabeth Neel presents a new body of work made in isolation on her family’s farm in rural Vermont. The large-scale paintings on canvas echo the natural environment and the physical and psychological tolls of isolation through a process of abstraction. Also on view is a short documentary about the artist by her brother, Andrew Neel, which explores her practice and fraught experience living as an artist within the legacy of her grandmother, Alice Neel.
“Limb after Limb” is on view at 2 Savile Row, London, W1S 3PA.
Simeon BarclayWorkplaceThrough October 29
Installation view, Simeon Barclay, “England’s Lost Camelot,” at Workplace.Courtesy of the artist and Workplace, London.
The U.K. artist Simeon Barclay has created new multimedia works and an installation for “England’s Lost Camelot,” on view at Workplace’s West End gallery. Taking its cue from Arthurian legends and the persistence of the figure of the gallant knight in British folklore and iconography, he follows this medieval legend through popular culture as well as his own personal biography, unpacking how these tropes play a role in determining notions of class, race, and gender.
“Simeon Barclay: England’s Lost Camelot” is on view at 40 Margaret Street, London, W1G 0JH.
Ösgür KarEmalinThrough November 10
Özgür Kar, Death with flute (2021). Photo: Stephen James. © Özgür Kar, courtesy of the artist and Emalin, London.
In “Storage Drama,” his first solo outing with Emalin, Turkish artist Özgür Kar presents three of his eerie “Death” sculptures, minimally animated drawings of musically inclined skeletons that ruminate on the nature of existence with humor and heft. There’s a timelessness to the anxiety expressed, evoking at once medieval manuscripts and plague traditions, but also the banal phrases of online exchanges and our contemporary moment of global disease. Scored by improvised woodwind riffs on an ominous tritone known as the “Devil’s Interval,” viewers might find themselves in a bit of a trance. As one of Kar’s characters puts it: “You either get the vibe or you don’t.”
“Storage Drama” is on view at 1 Holywell Lane, London, EC2A 3ET.
Ron MueckThaddaeus RopacThrough November 13
Ron Mueck, Dead Dad (1996–97). © Ron Mueck, courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac, London, Paris, Salzburg, and Seoul.
Spanning 25 years of Ron Mueck’s career, this historical exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac features some of the Australian sculptor’s most celebrated pieces plus never-before-exhibited works. Mueck’s famous sculpture Dead Dad (1996–97) is on view in the U.K. for the first time since it shocked in the Royal Academy’s storied 1997 “Sensation” exhibition, as is a new, as-yet-unseen cast-iron outdoor sculpture of a skull, Dead Weight (2021), which clocks in at a whopping one tonne. A moving figure of a young Black man with a stab wound, Youth (2009/2011), speaks to the urgency of addressing urban crime. From the small-scale to the monumental, the works on view evoke the gamut of human emotions and experiences.
“Ron Mueck: 25 Years of Sculpture 1996–2021” is on view at 37 Dover Street, London, W1S 4NJ.
“Sorry It’s a Mess, We Just Moved In!”LAMB ArtsThrough November 13
Clara Hastrup, Untitled (Leek) (2021). Courtesy of LAMB Arts, London.
This lively group exhibition explores everyday objects and the role they play in shaping and holding onto identity, asking whether, in a digital age, the physical carries more significance, or less. Curated by Roya Sachs, it places blue-chip names such as Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Erwin Wurm, and Isa Genzken in dialogue with works by emerging artists, such as Clara Hastrup’s photographs of “Perishable Sculptures,” to ask how we relate to objects, from throwaway items to functional commodities to treasured tokens of memory.
“Sorry It’s a Mess, We Just Moved In!” is on view at 32 St. George Street, London, W1S 2EA.
Noah DavisDavid ZwirnerThrough November 17
Noah Davis, 40 Acres and a Unicorn (2007). © The Estate of Noah Davis, courtesy of the Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner.
Curator Helen Molesworth has selected works by the late U.S. artist Noah Davis that span his brief but bright career for the first presentation of the artist’s dreamlike, figurative paintings in the U.K. The show is a follow-up to an acclaimed exhibition at David Zwirner in New York in January 2020, and while there are some repeats, most of the works on view will be different. Significantly, the London edition imports a version of the artist’s ambitious social-practice project, the Underground Museum, installed in the gallery’s upper level. Headquartered in an underserved Black and Latinx neighborhood in Los Angeles, the initiative is a Black-owned and -run art space that shows museum-quality work. Highlighting the importance to Davis of community, the show includes a sculpture by the artist’s widow, Karon Davis, and the film BLKNWS, by his brother, Kahlil Joseph, famed in his own right.
“Noah Davis” is on view at 24 Grafton Street, London, W1S 4EZ.
Issy Wood Carlos/IshikawaThrough November 20
Issy Wood, The sides (2021). © Issy Wood. Courtesy of the artist; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; and JTT, New York.
The young painting sensation Issy Wood’s exhibition “Trilemma” at Carlos/Ishikawa will scratch your brain—and not just because all the paintings are on velvet. The artist created this series of ‘depression’ paintings during lockdown in response to her contracted surroundings, and in works based on snippets of screenshots from the films and TV shows she was watching, there is an eerie sense of nostalgia for a world that once was. The show also includes a foray into installation with a suite of painted, velvet-upholstered Carlo Scarpa furniture entitled What if you showed up (2021) installed in the middle of the gallery.
“Issy Wood: Trilemma” is on view at Unit 4, 88 Mile End Road, London, E1 4UN.

“Social Works II”GagosianThrough December 18
Installation view, “Social Works II,” at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London. Courtesy Gagosian.
This group exhibition on view at the gallery’s Grosvenor Hill location is the sequel to recently-appointed director and curator Antwaun Sargent’s inaugural show at Gagosian in New York. It places front and center artists of the African diaspora whose projects extend beyond the walls of the gallery and into social practice. From architect Sumayya Vally’s wall fragment that functions as a site for research and ritual to historical collages by Black Arts Movement pioneer (and Turner Prize–winner) Lubaina Himid, the exhibition probes the ways that geography informs identity and perception in different communities and spaces.
“Social Works II” is on view at 20 Grosvenor Hill, London, W1K 3QD.

A.A. MurakamiSuperblueThrough Summer 2022
New Spring (2017). Photo: Juriaan Booij. Courtesy of COS x Studio Swine.
The Tokyo- and London-based duo A.A. Murakami—made up of Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves from Studio Swine—has been tapped to debut Superblue in London, following the global launch of the experiential art powerhouse in Miami in May.
For “Silent Fall”—on view at Pace’s former Burlington Gardens space—the pair is presenting a new, Instagram-friendly multi-sensory experience that immerses audiences in a seemingly infinite forest of glowing trees. Their branches emit misty bubbles, which unleash different scents of nature, from pine to moss, when they burst. It’s part of the artists’ “ephemeral tech” installations, which use sophisticated technology to recreate organic experiences, and offers a glimpse of a future world in which we are trying to recreate a sense of the sublime in a nature that is lost.
“Silent Fall” is on view at 6 Burlington Gardens, London, W1J 0PE.
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In the later category, she pointed to the work of photographer Marilyn Nance, famous for her work documenting African-American life and the African diaspora in New York (and beyond, though the works in this show are focused on New York City), as well as Hiram Maristany who grew up in East Harlem and regularly documented the lives of the close-knit Puerto Rican community.
Works by Hiram Maristany in “Greater New York.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Maristany was the official photographer of the activist group known as the Young Lords, Katrib noted. In addition to protests where they asserted their rights, the Lords were also involved in activities to support the East Harlem community, including organizing clothing drives and picking up trash.
Katrib pointed to a more contemporary documentary impulse in the work of Black Mass Publishing, a collective established in 2018. The group publishes zines and books of both new and archival content by Black artists aimed at fostering new conversations about Black cultural production.
Installation view of gallery devoted to Blackmass Publishing in “Greater New York.” Photo by Ben Davis.
In “Greater New York,’ one gallery, dubbed “Black Mass Publishing Study Hall,” features a library of zines and pamphlets to peruse.
Another work that seems to encapsulate New York City’s former gritty downtown days is the video of poet Diane Burns. Standing in front of trash and rubble-strewn empty lots, against a backdrop of ghostly tenement buildings, Burns is captured reciting her poem, Alphabet City Serenade, her voice looping in the galleries.
Video of Diane Burns, Poetry Spots: Diane Burns reads ‘Alphabet City Serenade’ (1989) in “Greater New York.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Burns, who was born in Kansas to a Chemehuevi father and an Anishinabe mother, ruminates on “Loisada” versus her life back home. “Hey man, can you spare a cigarette? Do you know of a place to sublet?,” she riffs.
Katrib pointed to Japanese-American artist Yuji Agematsu as using a mixture of both documentary and surrealism to convey his experience. zip:01.01.20 . . .12:31.20 (2020) is a massive but delicate wall-length work composed of a series of vitrines.
One of the cases from Yuji Agematsu, zip:01.01.20 . . .12:31.20 (2020). Photo by Ben Davis.
Inside each is a “calendar” with individual days portrayed as intact cellophane cigarette wrappers that serve as containers for the debris the artist gathered and placed in them on a particular day—chewed gum, bottle caps, scraps of paper—after having gathered them from the streets of New York.
“It’s like this calendar archive document, but it’s also very surreal and abstract,” says Katrib.
Works by G. Peter Jemison in “Greater New York.” Photo by Ben Davis.
The show has a focus on issues related to indigeneity. You see this, for instance, in the work of G. Peter Jemison, an enrolled member of the Seneca Nation of Indians. But it is also international in scope, incorporating the work of artists from Brazil, Iran, Lebanon, and Egypt, often touching on issues of attempted integration and feelings of estrangement.
The curatorial team also includes writer and curator Serubiri Moses, MoMA PS1 director Kate Fowle, and MoMA Latin American art curator Inés Katzenstein. After more than a year of lockdown and organizing—including Zoom studio visits with artists who were just minutes away—the show they have produced feels both timely and on point.
“The situation we’re in now is really just underscoring and underlining the things that artists were already dealing with,” says Katrib. “I think one of the biggest challenges was just the isolation, especially for the older generation of artists who were more at risk. We really wanted to respect and honor that New York is a city where different generations of artists can be together and support one another.”
“Greater New York” is on view at MoMA PS1 in New York through April 18, 2022. More

For all the criticisms of stodginess, it is a testament to the ongoing cultural significance of the Turner Prize—the U.K.’s most prestigious contemporary-art honor—that it continues to incite passionate analysis from aficionados and naysayers alike. Though historically a controversial event, recent years have seen increased fervor for upending the familiar formula, usually in the name of today’s most popular buzzword: “solidarity.” 
For instance, the 2019 finalists—Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo, and Tai Shani—famously both shunned and welcomed the award with their joint acceptance of the prize, made as a “statement in the name of commonality, multiplicity, and solidarity.” 
Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry, U.K., this year’s Turner Prize exhibition venue. © Garry Jones Photography.
In May 2020, Tate Britain doled out ten individual artists’ bursaries in lieu of a single winner and the customary group exhibition. Again, the lofty goal was to “help support a larger selection of artists through this period of profound disruption and uncertainty,” as Tate Britain announced in a press release. 
Now, in 2021, this turn toward the utopian continues, with this year’s iteration marking the first time the Turner Prize jury selected a shortlist consisting solely of artist collectives. Tate Britain has said that the nominees—Array Collective, Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.), Cooking Sections, Gentle/Radical, and Project Art Works—“reflect the solidarity and community demonstrated in response to the pandemic.”
Installation view of work by Gentle/Radical in the Turner Prize 2021 exhibition at the Herbert Art Museum and Gallery, Coventry. Photo: Garry Jones.
Indeed, the fabric of all five collectives’ practices consists of various threads of social activism woven together through film, painting, installation, or sound. But the decision sparked backlash, with a chorus of think pieces (in ArtReview, Frieze, and elsewhere) lamenting the character of the 2021 Turner Prize. Nominee B.O.S.S. actually issued its own statement denouncing the Tate’s allegedly superficial commitment to social issues.
Installation view of work by Gentle/Radical in the Turner Prize 2021 exhibition at the Herbert Art Museum and Gallery, Coventry. Photo: David Levene.
All of this preemptive brouhaha has finally culminated with the official opening of the Turner Prize exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry, the U.K.’s 2021 City of Culture. The five collectives’ presentations stretch across four individual galleries, with the Welsh entrant, Gentle/Radical, serving as the curtain-raiser in an introductory space removed from its nominated peers. The community activists—not all made up of traditional artists—present a series of flags alongside a projection focused around Gorsedd bardic prayers, in a defiant post-colonial reclamation of Welsh culture.
Installation view of work by Cooking Sections in the Turner Prize 2021 exhibition at the Herbert Art Museum and Gallery, Coventry. Photo: Doug Peters/PA Wire.
Elsewhere, the ultra-hot Cooking Sections, who just closed a stellar solo show at Tate Britain, somewhat lazily relies upon a reheat of that recent exhibition, once again examining the effects of salmon farming. Since this duo is concerned with how our food consumption impacts the climate emergency, why not shed light upon a new aspect of that complex and enormous issue, given the opportunity of this highly visible platform?
Installation view of work by B.O.S.S. in the Turner Prize 2021 exhibition at the Herbert Art Museum and Gallery, Coventry. Photo: David Levene.
B.O.S.S. offers a dark room sparsely outfitted with a stark set of speakers paired with flowing banners animated by household fans placed on the floor beneath, all capped off with a black obsidian sphere on a plinth. A streamer announces that “Sound is the only system,” which comes across as a half-baked declaration: despite the conviction with which it is declared, the statement’s zeal is rendered moot by the absence of precise meaning. (If the installation underwhelms, it should be noted that B.O.S.S.’s public criticism also addressed the lack of adequate time for the group to prepare for the exhibition.)
Installation view of work by Project Art Works in the Turner Prize 2021 exhibition at the Herbert Art Museum and Gallery, Coventry. Photo: Doug Peters/PA Wire.
Project Art Works, hailing from Hastings, restages a “typical” artist’s studio. Their intervention initially appears to be an ordinary creative space, with framed works hung on white walls. Yet the gallery’s conventional white-cube feel is interrupted by a smaller enclave, installed smack-dab in the center of the room, that houses an archive of over 4,000 works by neurodivergent artists. Project Art Work’s accomplishment is rooted in this sleight of hand, disarming the audience with the slick banality of the initial setting, which amplifies the revelation that neurodiverse creators are responsible for all of the art on view—thus making it clear that greater visibility and acceptance for such “disabilities” benefits culture at large.
Installation view of Project Art Works in the Turner Prize 2021 exhibition at the Herbert Art Museum and Gallery, Coventry. Photo: Garry Jones.
Last but not least, the Belfast-based Array Collective, which focuses on social issues affecting Northern Ireland—including abortion rights, queer visibility, mental health, and gentrification—has created a makeshift pub which takes up the majority of their allotted gallery space in an installation that stands head and shoulders above their fellow nominees.
The colloquial “pub” dates back to 1859, a slang shortening of “public house.” Though that fact is not explicitly referenced in the exhibition text, the idea of a location built solely as a space for a community to come together looms large here. A three-channel video work is mounted on the far wall, with members of marginalized communities relating mythological stories with knee-slapping barroom humor. I was moved to tears by one portion describing LGBTQ+ persons living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Despite the horror of that history, tales of “Catholic fairies” and “Protestant fairies” who managed to actively identify and recover a sense of love, kindness, and community provided the most powerful moment during this year’s remarkable Turner Prize exhibition.
Installation view of work by Array Collective in the Turner Prize 2021 exhibition at the Herbert Art Museum and Gallery, Coventry. Photo: David Levene.
Pitting socially-minded activist collectives against each other could be perceived as a contest of moral superiority, particularly when staged during a moment in which use of the term “solidarity” has become near-meaningless in its ubiquity. But even if the concept of solidarity seems saccharine—and even arguably outdated at this point—the Turner Prize jury correctly identified the pulse of current art-making. By that measure, this is a successful exhibition. It should appeal not only to those interested in contemporary art, but also to those with a stake in discourses propelling critical change in society today.
“Turner Prize 2021” is on view at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry, U.K., September 29, 2021–January 12, 2022.
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Of the many era-defining societal shifts and inequities that the Covid-19 pandemic has brought into focus and accelerated, the change in the ways we use and navigate the metaverse are perhaps the least widely recognized and understood. Our dependence on the virtual realm seemed to swell overnight, as those who could moved their work to online rooms, minted NFTs, traded cryptocurrencies, and sent their avatars gaming with like-minded strangers. Only now are we realizing that this version of Web 3.0 being created has the potential to be as grim as the current moment in our physical world: For one, right-wing extremists recruiting and organizing in online quest games has very concrete ramifications in real life.
In his nine-part Metaverse Primer, updated in June 2021 in response to the effects of the pandemic, venture capitalist and former head of strategy for Amazon Matthew Ball offers this definition: “The Metaverse is an expansive network of persistent, real-time rendered 3-D worlds and simulations that support continuity of identity, objects, history, payments, and entitlements, and can be experienced synchronously by an effectively unlimited number of users, each with an individual sense of presence.” Or, to put it in simpler terms, “No one really expected the next generation of the internet would come from mobile gaming, and yet here we are.” That some of the most in-depth writing about this new reality comes from a venture capitalist says it all.
Nektarios Pappas performing The Last Judgement–Reloaded at the 7th Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE.” Photo: Emilios Charalambous.
“ECLIPSE,” the 7th Athens Biennale (AB7), cocurated by Ghanaian-American curator Larry Ossei-Mensah and Omsk Social Club—a Berlin-based group whose practice is anchored in speculative role-play gaming—under the artistic direction of Poka-Yio, homes in on questions surrounding the utopian promise of Web 3.0. It is up to us, this divergent curatorial team argues, to lay claim, create, meet, build, and thrive in those digital realms. It’s on us to queer the Metaverse.
Fittingly, the list of participating artists includes many individuals and collectives working under pseudonyms and exploring the possibilities of digital practices. Afro-Hungarian artist Huntrezz Janos delivered a digital performance titled Eclipsatrix Exuvia during the biennial’s opening weekend, her bejeweled, chimeric avatar twerking and spinning on a screen inside one of the exhibition’s venues, a former department store. Nascent, a Berlin-based duo founded in 2018, is showing a multipart work titled Temporal Secessionism.  A series of digital clocks installed on all floors of the abandoned store, the work keeps track of three different time-measuring systems: one is based on real-time Bitcoin transactions; one shows the consensus of time that syncs all online servers; and another, dubbed “healing time,” moves according to the frequency of broken quartz, the crystal used in analog clockwork. On the 3rd floor, the pseudo-company Hypercomf (brainchild of the Greek artists Ioannis Koliopoulos and Paola Palavidi) has set up an office environment, replete with ergonomic chairs, branded mugs, and indoor plants, and desks made of pressed plastic waste. Some of these elements are coated with organic matter to enable mycelium growth, possibly inviting strands capable of decomposing plastics. Mycelium also happens to be the name of a popular Bitcoin wallet.
Claude Eigan, Inner Saboteur II (2019), at the 7th Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE.” Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Emilios Charalambous.
Despite its digital-savvy focus, AB7 also raises issues concerning our fragile physical existence and the class and racial inequalities affecting it. The approach, however, is to address and activate viewers’ tacit and embodied knowledge, rather than beating them over the head with identity politics: the messages are communicated not discursively but instead appeal to viewers’ intuitions surrounding social hierarchies and racial divides. It’s portraiture in lieu of manifestos.
In fact, there is a dazzling amount of photography on view by artists who consider, claim, and reimagine the ways in which to represent nonconforming, disobedient, or other-ed bodies. A series of portraits of members of South-Africa’s LGBTQ community by Zanele Muholi is stunningly straightforward; Kayode Ojo’s glossy portraits are jarring in their rejection of representational tropes, a rallying cry to turn our (luscious, warm) backs on excessive consumerism in favor of a celebration of the unbranded self. Awol Erizku’s still lifes, populated with signifiers of Black culture, are blown up to cover entire walls in what used to be the department store’s sports section.
Andrew Roberts, RHYTHM RATTLESNAKE: The world ends with you, baby centipede (2020), at the 7th Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE.” Photo: Nysos Vasilopoulos.
There are numerous soundscapes and sound installations by artists, including Moor Mother, whose activist spoken-word and protest poetry, which deals with intersectional feminism, inherited trauma, and systemic racism, resonate through the main venue. An installation by the Belgian composer and artist Billy Bultheel, commissioned for AB7, fills the basement of the former Santaroza Courthouse in Dikaiosinis (or Justice) Square, which stood empty for 30 years. The biennial’s organizers initiated the building’s reopening to the public, as well as the cleanup of the small green lung—so scarce in Athens—that the square provides between two main thoroughfares.
Labor and exhaustion was one of the curators’ considerations, too, often implied via its actual remedy—an invitation to take a seat. A series of upcycled chairs made at an Athens workshop, commissioned by London-based designer Yinka Ilori as part of his program for people in addiction recovery, greets viewers on the department store’s first floor. (Ilori was enlisted to design ONX Studio in Athens, the Onassis Foundation’s new extended-reality center, slated to open in 2022). On the upper level, fantastical animal-headed furniture by Nuri Koerfer invites viewers to pause and sit on the sculptural works.
Ayesha Tan Jones performing The New Elementals at the 7th Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE.” Photo: Nysos Vasilopoulos.
In the biennial’s third venue, an abandoned office building, Miles Greenberg, who’s the youngest artist on view at 22, enthralls with the video work Late October (2021). A protégé of Marina Abramović, Greenberg edited footage from a seven-hour durational performance he staged Paris last year, in which seven Black performers (including himself), each representing a figure from Greek mythology, perch atop slowly revolving plinths. Treating the body as sculptural material, the 20-minute piece speaks of the erosion of both artifacts and empires.
Cajsa von Zeipel, Formula X (2020), at the 7th Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE.” Courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery. Photo: Nysos Vasilopoulos.
But perhaps no other work captures the oscillation between the two realms we have come to create and exist in than Formula X (2021), a sculpture in silicone, rubber, and steel by Swedish artist Cajsa von Zeipel. Like a Mad Max: Fury Road amazon of the metaverse, a hyper-human pregnant figure is steering a three-wheel ATV into the unknown. Her bags are packed with diapers for her first baby and soon-to-be born second, and treats for her two dogs in tow, everything strapped onto her body or the vehicle with leather and rubber biker gear. The work’s dimensions are larger than life-size, just like the expectations and strain put on single mothers, not only during pandemic lockdowns. She is fierce and in control as she rides over sushi, which lodges between the tracks of the wheels. Or is this a projected avatar emerging from a deeply exhausted human existence?
The seventh Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE,” is on view at various venues throughout the city, September 24–November 28, 2021.
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Signs of fall have arrived in London. The air is brisk, leaves are beginning to change color, and a promenade through one of London’s royal parks leads to a parcours of contemporary sculpture. It can only mean one thing: Frieze Week is around the corner.
Now a yearly fixture teasing the arrival of the Frieze fairs in Regent’s Park, Frieze Sculpture opened to the public on September 14, a little later in the year than its usual summer opening due to ongoing complications relating to shipping. 
At the unveiling, Frieze London’s artistic director Eva Langret promised that Frieze and Frieze Masters, returning October 13–17 after a pandemic hiatus, will be back in force. The curator of the sculpture program, Clare Lilley (who is also the director of program at Yorkshire Sculpture Park), highlighted the global character of this year’s selection, with artists hailing from South America, South and North Africa, Indonesia, Pakistan, the U.S. and Canada, and Europe.
“I see exciting sculptural conversations across time and geography, and while many sculptures here relate to social and environmental concerns, there is much heightened color and dextrous handling of material, resulting in an overall sense that is celebratory,” Lilley said in a statement. “As we learn to live with the pandemic and emerge into public spaces, Frieze Sculpture 2021 allows people to come together in safety and with pleasure and is a tonic for the mind, body, and soul.”
Counterspace, fragment of Serpentine Pavilion 2021 for Frieze Sculpture 2021. Presented by Serpentine Galleries, London. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
The works, by 18 artists spanning three generations, range from soapstone skulls by Solange Pessoa to a quirky pineapple courtesy of Rose Wylie to Vanessa da Silva’s joyful steel-and-fiberglass figures, Muamba Grove.
One highlight is a fragment of this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, a gathering table designed by Johannesburg architectural studio Counterspace; its inclusion marks the first time one of the U.K.’s public institutions has taken part in the Frieze initiative (the other works are presented by commercial galleries). By extending the pavilion’s tendrils outside of its traditional home in Hyde Park, the installation is suggestive of themes relating to migration and displacement. Another notable entry is artist-preservationist Jorge Otero-Pailos’s Biosignature Preservation (2019), a repurposing of the security fence erected by the U.S. Embassy in Oslo after 9/11 that recalls contorted iron rebar left after bombings or natural disaster.
Frieze Sculpture is on view at the English Gardens in Regent’s Park, London, through October 31. See more images below.
Annie Morris, Stack 9, Ultramarine Blue (2021), presented by Timothy Taylor. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
Anthony Caro, Palanquin (1987/1991), presented by New Art Centre. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
Jorge Otero-Pailos, Biosignature Preservation (2019), presented by Holtermann Fine Art. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
Isamu Noguchi, Play Sculpture, ca. 1965/ca. 1980 (fabricated 2021), presented by White Cube. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
Vanessa da Silva, Muamba Grove #1, #3, and #4 (2019), presented by Galeria Duarte Sequeira. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
Gisela Colón, Quantum Shift (Parabolic Monolith Sirius Titanium) (2021), presented by Gavlak. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
Ibrahim El-Salahi, Meditation Tree (2018), presented by Vigo Gallery. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
Tatiana Wolska, Untitled (module 1 and 2) (2019), presented by L’Etrangère and Irène Laub Gallery. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
Solange Pessoa, Untitled, from “Skull” series (2016), presented by Mendes Wood DM. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
Stoyan Dechev, Event Horizon (2019), presented by Anca Poterasu Gallery. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
Rose Wylie, Pineapple (2020), presented by David Zwirner. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
Yunizar, Induk Monster (Mother Monster) (2017), presented by Gajah Gallery. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.

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If you thought $14 was an expensive price for avocado toast at your local cafe, how about $2.9 million (€2.5 million)?
That’s the cost of German artist Tim Bengel’s Who Wants to Live Forever?, a pure gold sculpture cast from an avocado on a bagel. 
The artwork, which scans as a mash-up of Maurizio Cattelan’s gold toilet (America [2016]) and duct-taped banana (Comedian [2019]), is up for sale now, via Galerie Rother. The piece will make its public debut tomorrow for Berlin Art Week, going on view at a local restaurant, the aptly-named Avocado Club.
The goal of Who Wants to Live Forever?, Bengel explained in a press release, was to “freeze the zeitgeist.” For him, avocados exist as a status symbol at the crossroads of several trends: millennial indulgence, the clean eating boom, and the global fruit industry’s impact on the environment.
Artist Tim Bengel with his sculpture. Courtesy of the artist.
He sees an analogy between his creation and the Greek myth of King Midas, who was granted his wish to turn anything into gold with a single touch, only to later die from starvation. “Something similar is happening today in turbo-capitalism,” Bengel’s press release reads, “which, in its greed for profit maximization, is destroying its own participants.”
To make the piece, the 29-year-old artist 3D-scanned 27 different pieces of his lunch: five avocado wedges, tomato slices, and onion rings; 10 arugula leaves; and two halves of pumpkin bagel. He then cast each piece in 18-carat gold and reassembled them as a sandwich. 
Altogether, the object weighs more than 26 pounds—which is roughly equivalent to an adult Corgi (albeit with a fraction of the charm). Galerie Rother even designed a specialized case to display the thing, which alone cost $47,000 (€40,000), according to German newspaper Stuttgart News.
In a statement, dealer Christian Rother said he believes the work could become “an icon of our time.”

“[The sculpture] will hopefully make big waves like the shredded Banksy or the diamond-covered skull by Damien Hirst,” Bengel told the news outlet.
The young artist first rose to fame around 2017, when his meticulous paintings, made by gluing gold leaf and colored sand to canvases, went viral online. For Berlin Art Week in 2019, he built an ominous skull-shaped garden from heather shrubs and marble gravestones.
Bengel’s avocado sculpture will make its way stateside later this year, arriving for Miami Art Week in December.
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