The 25 Best Works of the 21st Century

This year, frieze asked 200 artists, curators, critics and museum directors to name the most outstanding works of art from the past quarter century. From their nominations, we compiled a list of 25 works that have shaped contemporary art since the year 2000.

Every day this week, we will update this page with new works, counting down to number one.

25. THOMAS HIRSCHHORN, GRAMSCI MONUMENT, 2013

Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument was a vibrant, makeshift pavilion constructed on the grounds of the Forest Houses public housing development in the Bronx. Crafted from humble materials, the structure was emblazoned with slogans from Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, written in 1929–35 during his imprisonment by the Italian Fascist government. Built and animated by local residents, the Gramsci Monument hosted concerts, workshops and lectures on critical theory, inviting those often excluded from such discourse into spaces of thought and expression. While Hirschhorn orchestrated the project, the community led its realization; embodying a democratic form of cultural production, it avoided the pitfalls of other projects rooted in relational aesthetics by unfolding outside the museum. Evoking Gramsci’s emancipatory vision signalled a reaction to the ‘End of History’ cultural moment that Mark Fisher had identified in Capitalist Realism (2009), in the wake of the aftershocks of the War on Terror and Occupy. The work became a living reminder that political transformation demands cultural awakening – and that art can be its staging ground. — Wilson Tarbox

24. HITO STEYERL, HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A FUCKING DIDACTIC EDUCATIONAL .MOV FILE, 2013

What do ‘living in a gated community’, ‘surfing the dark web’ and ‘being a disappeared person’ have in common? These examples of ‘how not to be seen’, from Hito Steyerl’s 14-minute video by the same name, cast invisibility variously as privilege, resistance strategy and extra-legal punishment in an epoch of data surveillance, social media and drone warfare. Coinciding with related interrogations of (in)visibility by such artists as Zach Blas, James Bridle and Sondra Perry, as well as in Steyerl’s own writings, this absurdist how(-not)-to – a parody of wartime public information films – asks still-pressing questions about visibility and violence, and the potential for defiance and play in the face of data capture. — Cassie Packard

23. CHRISTIAN MARCLAY, THE CLOCK, 2010

Christian Marclay’s The Clock is a 24-hour cinematic timepiece composed of thousands of film and TV clips, each featuring clocks or references to temporality. From Bill Murray’s endless 6am wake-up in Groundhog Day (1993) to the Titanic’s departure at 11:53am revealed on a pocket watch, to the climactic lightning strike on the bell tower at 10:04pm in Back to the Future (1985), the work unfolds in perfect sync with real time. Spanning a century of cinema and numerous genres, this hypnotic, often humorous looped film examines media’s role as both mirror and escape, urging us to confront time as both lived experience and cinematic illusion. In an age ruled by constant broadcasting, live-streaming and artificial intelligence, The Clock feels less like a nostalgic homage to the past than a rigorous depiction of how our obsession with images defines both collective memory and the present. — Ivana Cholakova

22. IBRAHIM MAHAMA, OUT OF BOUNDS, 2015

Ibrahim Mahama’s monumental Out of Bounds, presented at Okwui Enwezor’s 2015 Venice Biennale, was impossible to miss. Spanning the entire length of two external walls of the Arsenale, the site-specific work, consisting of jute sacks woven into a vast tapestry, explored how labour and exchange are intertwined with the postcolonial condition in the artist’s home country of Ghana. The sacks are commonly used to transport cocoa beans, Ghana’s most important export; looking closely at the sacks, I spotted the names of traders, highlighting the many hands the sacks passed through before reaching Mahama. Acting as a second skin on the walls of the Arsenale – itself the former site of Venetian industry – Out of Bounds reckoned with a country’s journey from independence to the present and marked a pivotal moment in the young artist’s career. — Vanessa Peterson

21. DORIS SALCEDO, SHIBBOLETH, 2007

The Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern represents an exciting yet daunting challenge for an artist. How to fill that vast, imposing space? Doris Salcedo addressed this in 2007 by creating absence rather than presence – a void to peer into – and one of the simplest and most powerful works of art I’ve seen. The work was a crack in the concrete floor that ran the length of the space, cleaving it in two. The title, Shibboleth, refers to something that distinguishes members of a group, differentiating insiders from outsiders and emphasizing division. It felt dangerous and unsettling, like a crack in the structure, a schism, or the result of a man-made or natural disaster. The scar of the crack is still visible today. — Victoria Siddall

20. HARUN FAROCKI, SERIOUS GAMES I–IV, 2009–10

Harun Farocki’s ‘Serious Games’, a series of four video installations, features footage recorded at various US military sites, where computer game technology was used to both treat post-traumatic stress disorder and train soldiers for combat. In one scene, a man watches a video reconstruction of an attack on a military unit; as he does so, he calmly intones: ‘I remember just feeling like something bad was about to happen.’ In another scene, a 3D-modelled car is driven aimlessly down a makeshift desert road, frequently veering off course into the surrounding sand. Violence is, of course, present – visualized in the games as well as described in oral testimony from soldiers – but what makes the work so unsettling, so provocative, is just how normal it all looks: a video game like any other, divorced from the US-backed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which left hundreds of thousands dead. — Lou Selfridge

19. CAMILLE HENROT, GROSSE FATIGUE, 2013

Camille Henrot’s breakthrough video made a profound impact at its inaugural presentation in the Venice Biennale in 2013, garnering her the Silver Lion for a Promising Young Artist, and its resonance has only grown with time. The 13-minute piece interweaves a spoken-word recounting of cross-cultural origin stories with dizzying images that pop up as browser windows on a computer desktop. Grosse Fatigue became a paean to our increasing submersion into networked knowledge production. From its considerations of the vastness of universal creation to the intimacy of a smartphone screen in the palm of a hand, Henrot’s heart-pounding and rigorously researched work questions the very impetus of human desires to control and categorize the world. — Margot Norton

18. BANU CENNETOĞLU (FACILITATOR), THE LIST, 1993–ONGOING

‘Deliberately crushed by truck near Port of Ceuta (ES) after driver chased after refugees’, reads one entry in Banu Cennetoğlu’s The List, the artist’s register of the documented deaths of asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented migrants in and around Europe since 1993. His name was Omar, and he was just 16 years old. Cennetoğlu doesn’t see The List, which is compiled and updated annually by European NGO network UNITED for Intercultural Action, as an artwork; rather, she considers art a method of distribution beyond the fickleness of the media cycle. When the 2018 version was shown on a 280-metre hoarding on Great George Street during the Liverpool Biennial, it was repeatedly damaged. Rather than replace the ripped posters, the artist left them in situ as a visual representation of the lack of empathy that necessitates such a record in the first place. — Chloe Stead

17. RYAN TRECARTIN, I-BE AREA, 2007

Is there any work of art more prophetic of the media-saturated doom loop we live in than Ryan Trecartin’s I-Be Area? Almost exactly ten years before the launch of TikTok, Trecartin’s first major feature film – a nearly two-hour fever dream full of jump cuts and the kinds of filters now familiar to anyone with social media – fused the confessional argot of online subcultures with the language of reality television. Trecartin plays a clone and his metamorphosing avatars, who appear alongside a cast of manic friends with voices that whine like they’ve just taken a hit of laughing gas. Mail-order ‘media people’ give suburban tweens demonic digital makeovers. The vibe is David-Lynch-meets-Nickelodeon. Two decades later, I’d still take that dream over this nightmare. — Evan Moffitt

16. MARLENE DUMAS, ‘GREAT MEN’, 2014–ONGOING

Oscar Wilde, the flamboyant Irish writer who was cruelly imprisoned after his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas was exposed; Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician who helped pioneer modern computing and was chemically castrated by the British government; James Baldwin, the erudite American writer who was prevented from speaking at the 1963 March on Washington because of his sexuality and who eventually left the United States in response to relentless racism and homophobia: each was persecuted not in spite of their brilliance, but because of the truths they dared to embody. These are but a few of Marlene Dumas’s ‘Great Men’, a series of ink-wash portraits accompanied by scratchy inscriptions, which the South African artist presents en masse. Dumas’s gesture – a response to anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in Russia – is a defiant act of allyship. — Sean Burns

15. RUGILÉ BARZDZIUKAITÉ, VAIVA GRAINYTÉ AND LINA LAPELYTÉ, SUN & SEA, 2019

When I saw this opera at the 2019 Venice Biennale, the first thing that struck me was the heat. Inside the Lithuanian Pavilion, artificial sunlight blazed down on a scene of beachgoers involved in the kind of aggressive leisure activity that made you feel complicit just by watching. Standing on the balcony above the performers, I stared down at the bodies sprawled across the fake sand: people applying sunscreen, children building sandcastles, someone doing a crossword. Then they started singing. Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė’s Sun & Sea transformed a typical summer holiday into something profoundly eerie as around twenty performers broke into melancholic arias about work anxiety, ecological dread and romantic longing – all while maintaining the pantomime of relaxation. The Golden Lion was well-deserved, but the work’s actual achievement lies in its chilling prescience about how we would learn to live with perpetual catastrophe as ambient noise. — Fernanda Brenner

14. JEREMY DELLER, THE BATTLE OF ORGREAVE (AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL), 2001

In 2001, Jeremy Deller was commissioned by Artangel to orchestrate a 1,000-person reenactment of the confrontation between police and striking miners that took place in Orgreave, South Yorkshire, on 18 June 1984. It was terrifying. The ground thundered with galloping horses, shouting rent the air, and the rage at the loss of livelihoods and damage to communities still felt wildly, tangibly raw. Writing about the event years later in his book Art is Magic (2003), Deller explained: ‘It was never meant to heal community wounds … If anything, it was intended to make people angry again. I just thought something should happen there at that place as a memorial of sorts.’ — Jennifer Higgie

13. EMILY JACIR, WHERE WE COME FROM, 2001–03

‘If I could do anything for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?’ Emily Jacir began her project Where We Come From by posing this question to 30 Palestinians, living inside and outside Palestine, who had been denied entry into their homeland or whose movement was restricted by the Israeli occupation. Their responses ranged from mundane requests (‘Go to the Israeli post office in Jerusalem and pay my phone bill’) to poetic expressions of longing (‘Visit the sea at sunset and smell it for me’) and heartbreaking desires to reach loved ones (‘Visit my mother, hug and kiss her’). The project manifested in a powerful installation of photographs, videos and texts detailing the artist’s efforts to fulfil these requests. Where We Come From is a vital artwork that asks us to interrogate the quotidian privileges afforded to so many of us in this century and demands that we not look away when confronted with the discrimination and violence enacted upon so many others. — Eoin Dara

12. ANNE IMHOF, FAUST, 2017

In 2016, I wandered into Anne Imhof’s three-part opera Angst, at Kunsthalle Basel, expecting to stay for ten minutes – and emerged from the darkness two and a half hours later, dazed and rapturous. While nothing has matched the unexpectedness of that encounter for me, Faust – Imhof’s contribution to the German Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, which won the Golden Lion – is widely regarded as her Meisterwerk. During the opening, visitors queued for two hours to enter the Dobermann-guarded pavilion, drawing comparisons to Berlin club Berghain. Inside, guests encountered a huddle of hip performers moving with glacial slowness atop a glass platform. And, well, not much else. At five hours long, this era-defining performance is both a product of and an attack on the attention economy, its slick aesthetics and easily shareable nature belying its demanding duration and quiet nihilism. — Chloe Stead

11. ANDREA FRASER, UNTITLED, 2003

Andrea Fraser’s notorious artwork – a silent video document of sex between herself and an art collector – was conceived while the artist was deciding whether to return to working with commercial galleries. Organized by her dealer Friedrich Petzel and paid for by the participating collector (who received one of the five produced DVDs), the work examines artistic labour and commodity exchange, subjects that have long preoccupied the artist. Fraser extends her inquiry here by transforming the sale of art from an impersonal to an interpersonal transaction by physically implicating the work’s patron in its production. In a 2004 interview with Gregg Bordowitz, the artist described what makes the work exploitative by the sale of the other four DVDs, which introduced the potential for others ‘to profit more from my labour than I do myself ’ – a prescient commentary on the art market of the decades to follow. — Marko Gluhaich

10. ADRIAN PIPER, ADRIAN MOVES TO BERLIN, 2007

In 2007, Apple released the first iPhone. It was also the year Adrian Piper meditated on her emigration from the United States to Germany with a video, Adrian Moves to Berlin. Here Piper dances to house music in Alexanderplatz, whose former Stalinist desolation now includes a shopping mall. Surveilled by perplexed passers-by, the artist wears jeans, a pink scarf and sunglasses. She taps into the beat and glides, even as the video cuts to an alternate shot, displacing the viewer. It’s a piece about self-determination, the terrible power of spectatorship, the mystery of historical consciousness. Most of all, it’s about letting go. — Lucy Ives

9. FRANCIS ALŸS, WHEN FAITH MOVES MOUNTAINS, 2002

‘It’s too high,’ says a man gesturing towards a mound of desert sand on the outskirts of Lima, Peru. Along with a suite of photographs, drawings, maps, prints and a single folded white T-shirt, the film documents Francis Alÿs’s 2002 performance When Faith Moves Mountains, for which the artist enlisted nearly 500 volunteers – mostly university students, gathered largely by word of mouth – to move a sand dune 500 metres in diameter just 10 centimetres. Throughout the film, individuals reflect on the seemingly impossible task while still committing to its execution. A distillation of Latin America’s long history of colonial conquest, migration and urban development, the ephemeral work is also a parable for the necessary labour – and belief – required to realize social transformation. — Tausif Noor

8. DAVID HAMMONS, OH SAY CAN YOU SEE, 2017

In 2017, David Hammons remade the United States flag in the red, black and green of the Pan-African flag, created in 1920 by Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. The work’s title refers to the lyrics of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ while also alluding to the nation’s indifference to the ever-rising tide of anti-Blackness. If Hammons’s earlier, intact African American Flag (1990) is a nod to the centrality of the Black experience in America, then Oh Say Can You See – faded, tattered and riddled with holes – is emblematic of the backlash against that belief. — Glenn Ligon

7. BOUCHRA KHALILI, THE MAPPING JOURNEY PROJECT, 2008–2011

In Bouchra Khalili’s video work The Mapping Journey Project, eight individuals who have been displaced from their homes for economic, political or social reasons recount their migratory journeys around the Mediterranean, both orally and in marker pen across the borders of a map. Earlier this year, the artist told me that the work’s fundamental premise is the question: ‘How can we form communities that are free from the restrictive ideas of belonging shaped by the nation-state model?’ The participants, now possessed of the agency to relay their personal histories of statelessness, bear witness, for Khalili, not only to ‘their survival but also to their becoming’. The work is a testament to anti-colonial and internationalist solidarity, whose necessity persists as the arbitrariness, violence and reinforcement of borders underlies the greatest humanitarian crises of today. — Marko Gluhaich

6. PIERRE HUYGHE, UNTILLED, 2010–13

It was not easy to encounter Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled when it appeared at documenta 13 in 2012. The sculpture – comprising a concrete replica of a 19th-century reclining nude by Swiss artist Max Weber with its head encased by a live beehive, surrounded by medicinal and psychotropic plants favourable to pollinators – was tucked away in a composting facility in the large park behind the Fridericianum. Yet almost instantly, the dreamy, haunting installation, one of the artist’s ‘biotopes’, became an indelible work of art for an age of climate breakdown, suggesting that a troubled future might still yield startling new poetic images and unexpected continuities. — Andrew Durbin

5. DANH VO, WE THE PEOPLE, 2010-14

Even before laying eyes on Danh Vo’s We the People, I’d heard the fairy-tale account of its origins: that, on the basis of a nascent friendship with a federal archivist, Vo had been permitted to make copies of the Bartholdi and Eiffel blueprints for the Statue of Liberty and was having the parts manufactured in Shanghai. As is typical of Vo, he sidestepped questions about meaning and intent, saying he was fascinated by how thin the original repoussé copper was, at less than 3mm. Eventually, I encountered some of the massive fragments and was wowed by their enormity and strangeness. But I was also taken aback by the tinsmithing – the suturing and hammering, the hidden armatures, and the touch of the craftspeople who laboured to execute these ghostly, simulacral forms. — Moyra Davey

4. JOHN AKOMFRAH, THE UNFINISHED CONVERSATION, 2012

Adhering to the adage that the personal is political, John Akomfrah’s The Unfinished Conversation (2012) is a moving, pioneering meditation on how one person’s life story can narrate and chart global instability and political shifts in relation to race, class and cultural politics. Akomfrah’s three-screen installation focuses on the life of the theorist and sociologist Stuart Hall, from his childhood in Jamaica to his move to Britain in 1951 to study at Oxford and his editorship at the New Left Review. Akomfrah masterfully interweaves excerpts from Hall’s numerous BBC appearances with quotations from other writers and archival footage of global protest, war, police violence and independence movements in former colonies such as Ghana. The 45-minute film insists that identities, especially for those who are marginalized, are constantly in flux, and implores us to believe that, in the words of Hall, ‘another history is always possible’. — Vanessa Peterson

3. KARA WALKER, A SUBTLETY, 2014

Upon entering the abandoned Domino Sugar Factory on the Williamsburg waterfront in summer 2014, a sickly-sweet smell immediately wafted over me – a sensory reminder of the toils of past sugar labourers here. Inside the cavernous factory, a dozen little brown boys cast in molasses, like giant lollipops, formed a tender, reverential assembly around the monumental, Sphinx-like ‘mother’, sculpted out of refined white sugar. Kara Walker’s A Subtlety recalled the brutal legacies of slavery, the whitewashing of American history and the persistence of systemic racism. She told NPR at the time that the work was ‘about trying to get a grasp on history’. But it was also a twisted trap, one that made it impossible to turn away from historic attitudes towards the Black female body. — Anne Pasternak

2. ARTHUR JAFA, LOVE IS THE MESSAGE, THE MESSAGE IS DEATH, 2016

An eight-minute bomb that nails the turbulent 2010s in Black America: a meticulous video collage that thieves-and-pastes from an abyss of social media, archives and watermarked footage, scraping the poor image up against the privatized. Personal vignettes collide with a kaleidoscope of images from African American history (dance, music, sport, civil rights), and the totality is framed as cosmic (those sun flares!). Is it overdependent on that sublime Kanye West soundtrack? Yes, but more crucial is how Jafa edits his footage, creating what he calls ‘Black visual intonation’. Could it be more feminist? Frankly, yes, but the humanity here is still breathtaking: an ultra-compressed detente between agonizing violence and unstoppable joy. — Claire Bishop

1. CAMERON ROWLAND, ATTICA SERIES DESK, 2016

I first saw Cameron Rowland’s Attica Series Desk (2016) at Artists Space in New York. Rowland had only been showing for a few years, but I remember feeling a sense of urgency, knowing this was an important moment for both the artist and the art world. The work itself, of course, appeared to be an unremarkable office desk; only later did I learn it had been manufactured by incarcerated labourers at Attica Correctional Facility and purchased through the New York state correctional industries catalogue – a readymade charged with the disquieting truth of the prison industrial complex. That knowledge transformed its bureaucratic banality into something discreetly monumental and deeply unsettling. Like much of Rowland’s practice, the work confronts the material traces of systemic inequity and property relations, making visible what is often hidden. Nearly a decade later, the weight of that first encounter still lingers. — Terence Trouillot

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