Issue 213
September 2020

‘The idea of the glitch pushes back against the speed at which images of Black bodies and queer bodies are consumed online.’ – Legacy Russell 

In the September issue of frieze, poet Momtaza Mehri talks to the author of Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020), Legacy Russell; Charles Aubin, Aruna D’Souza, Brendan Fernandes, Ligia Lewis and Paul Maheke consider how artists and institutions can adapt to the post-pandemic world; Beatriz Santiago Muñoz answers our questionnaire; and Shawné Michaelain Holloway appears on the cover. 

Also featuring: An essay by Sinéad Gleeson on Jesse Darling, Julia Phillips, Diamond Stingily and Donald Rodney. A profile by contributing editor Aaron Peck of the artist Lucy McKenzie ahead of her retrospective at Munich’s Museum Brandhorst. 1500 words by the author Ben Lerner on how the paintings of Margaux Williamson transport him to the moment when he first fell in love with making art. And Jessica Lynne responds to Ming Smith’s Amina and Amiri Baraka (Lovers) (1980). 

Verónica Bayetti Flores reviews Arca’s fourth studio album, KiCk i (2020); Lucy Ives on Shane Carruth’s 2004 dystopian buddy movie, Primer; Fred Wilson on visiting the Temple of Dendur at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; Cao Fei, Agnieszka Kurant, Jennifer Moon, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Pope.L, Luiz Roque, Cecilia Vicuña and Anicka Yi offer their predictions for the art world in 2050; and Alexander Kluge searches history for those who sought to own the future by conquering the past. 

Plus, in homage to Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988), ten essays to the world after the COVID-19 crisis. These pieces are divided into six categories: ‘lightness’, ‘quickness’, ‘exactitude’, ‘visibility’, ‘multiplicity’ and ‘consistency’ with contributions from Chloe Aridjis, Helen Dewitt, Helen Grubbs, Alexandra Kleeman, Sarah Manguso, Nisha Ramayya, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Kara Walker and Elvia Wilk.

From this issue

Alexandra Kleeman dwells on the necessity of coherence within a pandemic 

BY Alexandra Kleeman |

Nine artists and curators give their predictions

BY frieze |

The Canadian painter’s new work offers a ‘vivid experience of perception without vivid percepts’

BY Ben Lerner |

Ex voto-like works by Jesse Darling, Julia Philips, Diamond Stingily and the late Donald Rodney imagine a world ordered differently 

BY Sinéad Gleeson |

What was lost – and what was gained – when the Temple of Dendur came to the Met? 

BY Fred Wilson |

In three stories, the German filmmaker and writer bears witness to the tentativeness of history

BY Alexander Kluge |

Charles Aubin, Aruna D’Souza, Brendan Fernandes, Ligia Lewis and Paul Maheke take stock of the performance world in the wake of COVID-19 

Primer (2004) asks what happens when history is always hanging in the balance

BY Lucy Ives |

‘There are artists whose work I’ve loved since I was 12 or 13 and, every once in a while, I go back to them to renew my spirit’

BY Beatriz Santiago Muñoz |

Smith – the subject of a new monograph by Aperture – evokes music and pace through her use of the blur

BY Jessica Lynne |

The author of Glitch Feminism on correcting the cyberfeminist canon, the Black trauma at the root of memes and why online space is still ‘real’

BY Momtaza Mehri AND Legacy Russell |

The artist’s ambitious fourth studio album is a genre-bending journey of defiance and radiant elation

BY Verónica Bayetti Flores |

A statistician and a novelist on the links between dataviz and storytelling

BY Helen DeWitt AND Andrew Gelman |

For David Grubbs, an onrush of music has led to a rethinking of musical ‘speed’ itself

BY David Grubbs |

Recent events have shown how deeply our lives are enmeshed with those of others – with the potential for both support and harm

BY Nisha Ramayya |

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung on Little Richard, Édouard Glissant and unapologetic Blackness

Retro pleasures are a smokescreen that fails to conceal the painfully quick dismantling of institutions that have lasted centuries

BY Sarah Manguso |

The weightlessness of the iconic film helps alleviate the oppressive pull of reality

BY Chloe Aridjis |

Describe a global crisis in 600 words? Too hard. But isn’t everything else irrelevant right now?

BY Elvia Wilk |

Every day in ‘lockdown’, we are asked to consider the effects of social distancing – as if segregation weren’t already a reality  

BY Kara Walker |