Frieze Los Angeles returns from 17 – 20 February 2022 at its new location in the heart of Beverly Hills at 9900 Wilshire Boulevard.
Visitors will discover art from emerging stars to global icons and the Fair will feature an expanded line-up of over a hundred LA-based and international galleries including: Blum & Poe, The Box, Commonwealth and Council, Gallery Hyundai, Pace Gallery and Maureen Paley.
However, for UK based art enthusiasts who are unable to make it to Los Angeles this month, Frieze has published a review of UK exhibitions to see this February:
Sim Smith, London
15 January – 12 February 2022
Sim Smith presents ‘I see you in everyone I love’, Daisy Parris’ second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition journeys through painterly storms across works in hugely varying scales, in an exploration of fears, anxieties and emotions felt by us all at one stage or another; grief, loss, agony, potential and hope.
‘Memeplex™’
Seventeen Gallery, London
11 December 2021 – 19 February 2022
Memeplex™ is two stories in one. The first explores the implementation of ideas, belief and conviction that occurs through memetic artefacts. In this instance they are political living memes that attach themselves to the host in order to perform a survivalist function, reminiscent of the pathogenic fungi Cordyceps. The Cordyceps is a genus of parasitic fungi that grows in the larvae of insects. When these fungi infect their host, they replace its tissue and sprout long, slender stems that grow outside the host’s body. They are known to take over the mind of the host, controlling its mind and behaviour, leading to the nickname ‘zombie fungi’. In the second part of the story, we learn that the human body now carries animal, mineral and botanical genes, and with contact this increases, bringing into question the human-centric narrative that is navigated through practices of Otherkin, Therian and Skinwalkers.
Analogous to this, Memeplex™ as an exhibition acts as a body to host a contagion of performance, video, images and objects.
Lubaina Himid
Tate Modern, London
25 November 2021 – 03 July 2022
This large-scale exhibition debuts Himid’s recent work and selected highlights from her influential career. Taking inspiration from her interest in theatre, the exhibition unfolds in a sequence of scenes designed to place visitors centre-stage and backstage.
Himid has been pivotal in the UK since the 1980s for her contributions to the British Black arts movement, making space for the expression and recognition of Black experience and women’s creativity. Over the last decade, she has earned international recognition for her figurative paintings, which explore overlooked and invisible aspects of history and of contemporary everyday life. In 2017 she was awarded the Turner Prize and in 2018 she was bestowed with the honorary title of CBE for her contributions to the arts.
‘Our Silver City, 2094’
20 November 2021 – 18 April 2022
‘Our Silver City 2094’ is an exhibition that shows you a possible future world of how Nottingham could be. This world is shows has been reshaped by decades of crisis and collapse: resource wars and evacuations, plastic-eating bacteria and flooding. Once known as Nottingham, the Silver City is set against a backdrop of fire seasons and widening waterways.
It traces a route from change to understanding, from inner knowledge to wisdom. Along the way, it shows a selection of artefacts, remnants and artworks connecting the long 21st century with what went before. All exhibitions invite us to travel in time, but this one insists on it.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
Arebyte Gallery, London
19 November 2021 – 19 February 2022
Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley’s exhibition, ‘She Keeps Me Damn Alive’, uses the artist’s recent series of DOTCOM works, blacktransarchive.com, blacktransair.com and blacktranssea.com as a starting point for furthering research on Archiving the black trans experience via interactivity and storytelling. The exhibition encompasses a new body of work that positions gaming at the forefront of ideas surrounding action, inaction, relation and archiving experience.
This methodology takes shape as an immersive point-and-shoot style arcade game asking visitors to question how their choices and actions (or inactions) affect others directly.
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Photo: Lubaina Himid
Between the Two my Heart is Balanced, 1991
Tate © Lubaina Himid