Press » Releases

Frieze Projects is a programme of artists’ commissions realised annually at Frieze Art Fair. It is curated by Neville Wakefield and includes seven new projects as well as The Cartier Award and collaborations with this year’s partner institutions CAC Vilnius (Lithuania) and Arte Contempo (Portugal).
The seven artists commissioned to create site-specific work for Frieze Art Fair are Mike Bouchet, Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth, Ruth Ewan, Ryan Gander, Per- Oskar Leu, Monika Sosnowska and Stephanie Syjuco. Commenting on this year’s projects, Neville Wakefield stated: “Whether taking the form of grand architectural obstruction or finding new ways of protesting, authenticating or motivating our relationship to the objects we make, look at and buy, this year’s projects create aesthetic opportunity out of the uncertainty that has become the hallmark of our troubled times.”
Above all, Frieze Projects presents art that regards the particular circumstances of Frieze Art Fair as an opportunity to create work that could not exist elsewhere.
The Cartier Award 2009 recipient is Jordan Wolfson. Wolfson will present an intervention based on String Theory that continues his translations of culture and recent histories into a unique conceptual language.
Frieze Projects is commissioned by Frieze Foundation and presented in association with Cartier. Frieze Foundation is supported by the Culture Programme of the European Union and Arts Council England.
— End.

Editor’s Notes

Frieze Projects 2009

Mike Bouchet: Sell and Destroy: Redrawing the Bottom Line
California-born and Frankfurt-based artist Bouchet will provide a motivational speaker for the populace of Frieze Art Fair. Bouchet’s speaker, like those found in the programmes of business conventions, will tailor their positive reinforcement skills to make presentations on topics important to the art business, such as the gallerist as cultural ambassador, how to sell more challenging works and positive visualization towards increased sales.

Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth: Players
UK-based collaborators Coleman and Hogarth will create a seamless projection of stage- managed and live events filmed at the fair, transforming the exposition into a mise-en- scene featuring unwitting visitors, gallerists and art fair workers. Players will heighten our sensual awareness of the staging of the fair; mixing the premeditated and the spontaneous, what’s to be scrutinised and what’s not, what’s appreciated and what’s taken for granted.

Ruth Ewan: These Airwaves Neutralise the Tools of Oppression; A Radio Station of People Trying to Change the World
Working alongside Resonance104.4fm radio the entire contents of A Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World will be broadcast in its entirety on its own frequency. Started in 2003, the artist’s collection of around 1,500 politically motivated or idealistic songs now lasts for the exact duration of the Fair. The songs will be broadcast live, day and night, from a booth inside Frieze Art Fair.

Ryan Gander: *We are Constant_
The London-based artist will set up an (almost) instant photo studio to make portraits of visitors to the fair looking at an artwork of their choice. The portrait will be printed immediately, given to the subjects and a copy will be hung in an installation along the entrance corridor to the fair. An evolving commentary on the consumption of art and the construction of the fair as a spectacle in which the content is removed, Gander will produce a portrait of the fair through its population.

Per-Oskar Leu: The Bachelor Machine
The Norwegian artist will arrange an impossible event at the fair – a book signing by Franz Kafka, 85 years after his death. Since none of Kafka’s novels were published during his lifetime, this book signing will be his first. Using autopen technology and facsimile first editions, the project is both a humorous commentary on trade fairs in general and a complex set of links between sinister machines – the sentencing / punitive machine in Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, Duchamp’s Bachelor Machine and the innocuous yet deceptive Autopen itself, recently used by Donald Rumsfeld to sign letters to the families of US soldiers killed in combat.

Monika Sosnowska: Untitled
The Polish artist will present a major structural intervention in which a large, heavy object crashes into the roof of the fair. Taking the form of a scale model of the infamous Palace of Culture in Warsaw – a ‘gift’ to the Polish people from the USSR – Sosnowska’s project is a kind of cultural meteorite, the imposition of one cultural edifice onto another.

Stephanie Syjuco: Copystand: an autonomous manufacturing zone
During Frieze Art fair, Syjuco will set up a parasitic workshop in which a small group of artists will make bootleg copies of other works exhibited in the fair. The artists will use basic and inexpensive materials and will work in a gallery stand at the fair in full view of visitors. The copies will be displayed in an adjacent gallery stand. Copystand draws on Syjuco’s recent projects involving approximate copies: crocheted branded luxury goods, cardboard replicas of Charlotte Perriand furniture and body doubles: the landscape of her native Phillippines standing in for Vietnam in Hollywood war movies.

Collaborating Partner Institutions

Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (Lithuania)
Curators Kestutis Kuizinas and Simon Rees have commissioned artist Mindaugas Navakas to create Smash the Windows, Snatch the Crystals, made from window frames and panes recently removed from the CAC. The marriage of a monumental sculpture and material from a famous example of soviet modernist architecture is playful reflection on ways that art forms, and memories, associated with history can be productively remade. Accompanied by a panel discussion presented in the Frieze Talks programme, the CAC’s project for Frieze Art Fair is a reflection on monumentality in post-Soviet countries and how its significance differs from the role and meaning of the monument in the west.

Arte Contempo, Lisbon (Portugal)
Curators Filipa Oliveira and Miguel Amado will present a group of artists’ commissions that play on the transactional nature of the art fair. From their stand, visitors will be invited to engage in a number of activities that reverse or subvert the usual exchange of money for goods or services.

Resonance 104.4fm
London’s art radio station will again be broadcasting live from the fair. The Frieze Talks programme will be broadcast alongside specially commissioned radio art projects and interviews with artists and art professionals around the fair. Fair visitors will be able to watch the resonance team at work and contribute to the debate. Listeners in the London area can tune in on 104.4FM or via the Internet on www.resonancefm.com.

The Cartier Award is an extraordinary opportunity for artists to realize a major new work at Frieze Art Fair as part of Frieze Projects. Works may be site-specific installations, performance, film, video or print. The award provides project production costs of up to £10,000, an artist’s fee of £1,000, and a three-month residency at Gasworks including accommodation, per diems and travel expenses. The award is open to non-UK based artists within five years of graduating from an undergraduate or postgraduate degree.

Cartier is the associate sponsor of Frieze Art fair supporting Frieze Projects and the Cartier Award. Their dedicated support expresses the spirit of the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art.

Frieze Talks includes panel discussions, conversations and keynote lectures from leading artists, writers and cultural commentators debating issues in aesthetics, ethics, writing and art production. Frieze Talks is presented by Frieze Foundation and programmed by the editors of frieze magazine.

Access to Frieze Talks is included in the Frieze Art Fair admission ticket. Seats for each day’s talks can be individually booked from 11am on the day.

Frieze Film will present a newly commissioned project in four parts by Danish artist- activists Superflex. Taking as their inspiration a passage in Lars von Trier’s film Epidemic, Superflex’s new films will show prominent figures who combine the worlds of art and finance, as they subject themselves to hypnosis.

Frieze Film will be shown in Channel 4’s ‘3 Minute Wonder’ slot during the week of Frieze Art Fair from Monday 12 October to Thursday 15 October, at 7.55pm.

Frieze Education is a four-day programme of artist-led events with scheduled workshops for schools on weekdays and drop-in activities for families at the weekend. Frieze Education is programmed by ReachOutRCA and is held annually in the Deutsche Bank Education Space. For further information see www.friezefoundation.org/education.

*Frieze Art Fair Tours are guided tours of approximately one hour, presented in association with The Art Fund, available to individuals and groups. Dedicated Frieze Projects tours are also available. For further details contact tours@frieze.com.

Frieze Art Fair features 150 of the most dynamic art galleries in the world, showing over 1,000 of the most exciting artists working today, Frieze Art Fair is the contemporary art event of the year.