Frieze London 2022

William Kentridge

William Kentridge (b. 1955, Johannesburg, South Africa) is internationally acclaimed for his drawings, films, theatre and opera productions.

In 2024, in Venice, Kentridge premiered a new nine-episode video series SELF-PORTRAIT AS A COFFEE-POT – a site-specific installation curated by long-time collaborator and curator Carolyn Christov Bakargiev at the Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation. Folowing this, in October, MUBI presented: William Kentridge’s ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ Premiere in New York.

In conjunction with the world premiere of his newly commissioned opera The Great Yes, The Great No, which debuted at LUMA Arles in July 2024, the solo exhibition Je n’attends plus (I’m Not Waiting Any Longer) presents a collection of major works, some of which had not been seen in Europe before.

Kentridge’s largest UK survey to date was held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2022. An iteration of Kentridge’s Royal Academy survey opened at the Taipei Museum of Fine Arts in May 2024. In the same year Kentridge opened another major survey exhibition, In Praise of Shadows, at The Broad, Los Angeles. In 2023, this exhibition travelled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Kentridge’s work has been seen in museums across the globe since the 1990s, including the Luma Foundation, France (2024); Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation, Venice (2024); Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2024); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1999, 2005, 2010); Albertina Museum, Vienna (2010); Musée du Louvre, Paris (2010); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid (2015); Kunstmuseum Basel (2019); Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2019). The artist has also participated in biennale’s including Documenta in Kassel (2012, 2002, 1997) and the Venice Biennale (2015, 2013, 2005, 1999, 1993).

Collections include: MoMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi and Zeitz MoCAA, Cape Town.

Kentridge lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Alfredo Jaar

Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956, Santiago, Chile) is an artist, architect, and filmmaker who considers social injustices and human suffering through thought-provoking installations. Throughout his career Jaar has used different mediums to create compelling work that examines the way we engage with, and represent humanitarian crises. He is known as one of the most uncompromising, compelling, and innovative artists working today.

Through photography, film and installation he provokes the viewer to question our thought process around how we view the world around us. Jaar has explored significant political and social issues throughout his career, including genocide, the displacement of refugees across borders, and the balance of power between the first and third world.

Jaar’s work has been shown extensively around the world. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013), Sao Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010) as well as Documenta in Kassel (1987, 2002).

Important individual exhibitions include The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1992); Whitechapel, London (1992); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1995); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1994); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2005) and The Nederlands Fotomuseum (2019). Major recent surveys of his work have taken place at Musée des Beaux Arts, Lausanne (2007); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2008); Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlinische Galerie and Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst e.V., Berlin (2012); Rencontres d’Arles (2013); KIASMA, Helsinki (2014); and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2017).

The artist has realised more than seventy public interventions around the world. Over sixty monographic publications have been published about his work. He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. He was awarded the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2018, and has recently received the prestigious Hasselblad award for 2020.

His work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MOCA and LACMA, Los Angeles; MASP, Museu de Arte de São Paulo; TATE, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centro Reina Sofia, Madrid; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; MAXXI and MACRO, Rome; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlaebeck; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and Tokushima Modern Art Museum, Japan; M+, Hong Kong; and dozens of institutions and private collections worldwide.

The artist lives and works in New York, USA.

Zineb Sedira

Zineb Sedira’s (b. 1963 Paris, France) work has enriched the debate around the concepts of modernism, modernity and its manifestations in an inclusive way for over the fifteen years of her practice. She has also raised awareness of artistic expression and the contemporary experience in North Africa.

She found inspiration initially in researching her identity as a woman with a singular personal geography. From these autobiographical concerns she gradually shifted her interest to more universal ideas of mobility, memory and transmission. Full of her fascination for the relationship between mother and daughter, her vidéo Mother Tongue (2002), depicts three generations of women and raises the issue of transmission in a globalized world.

Sedira has also addressed environmental and geographical issues, negotiating between both past and future. Using portraits, landscapes, language and archival research, she has developed a polyphonic vocabulary, spanning fiction, documentary and more poetic and lyrical approaches. Sedira has worked in installation, photography, film, video and she has recently returned to object-making. Preserving and transmitting memories of the past in order to leave a legacy for the future has often been at the core of Sedira’s work.

Sedira’s work was shown in several solo exhibitions including at the Photographer’s Gallery (London, 2006), at Wapping Project (London, 2008), at New Art Exchange (Nottingham, 2009), at Pori Museum (Finland, 2009), at BildMuseets (Sweden, 2010), at Kunsthalle Nikolaj (Copenhagen, 2010), at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2010), at the [mac] musée d’Art contemporain of Marseille (2010), at the Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, at Prefix – Institute of Contemporary Art (Toronto, 2010) and et at the Charles H. Scott Gallery in Vancouver and at Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2013).

Her work was also shown in many group shows in institutions such as Tate Britain (London, 2002), Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2004, 2009), Mori Museum (Tokyo, 2005), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead, 2005), Musée d’Art Moderne of Alger (2007), Brooklyn Museum (New York, 2007), Mathaf – Arab Museum of Modern Art (Qatar, 2010), the Contemporary Art Center (Thessaloniki, 2011) at the Tate Britain, London, UK, at the MuCEM, Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerrannée and the Friche de la Belle de Mai (2013), Marseille, at the Gwangju Museum of Art, South Korea, at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2013), at the MMK Museum für Mordern Kunst, Germany (2014), as well as in biennials and triennials, including the Venice Biennale (2001 and 2011), the triennial for photography and video at the Institute of Contemporary Photography in New York (2003), the Sharjah Biennale (2003 and 2007) and the Folkestone Triennial (2011).

Sedira is founder of aria (artist residency in algiers), a residency program to support the development of the contemporary art scene in Algeria through international cross-cultural exchanges and collaborations.

Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat (b. 1957, Qazvin, Iran) is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. Neshat’s early photographic works include the Women of Allah series (1993–1997), which explored the question of gender in relation to Islamic fundamentalism and militancy. Her subsequent video works departed from overtly political content or critique in favor of more poetic imagery and narratives. In her practice, she employs poetic imagery to engage with themes of gender and society, the individual and the collective, and the dialectical relationship between past and present, through the lens of her experiences of belonging and exile. 

She has mounted numerous solo exhibitions at museums internationally, including: the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Serpentine Gallery, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Recent solo exhibitions include: Kunstraum Dornbirn, Austria; Faurschou Foundation, Copenhagen; Kunsthalle Tübingen, Germany; and Museo Correr,Venice,  Italy, which was an official corollary event to the 57th Biennale di Venezia in 2017. A major retrospective of her work was exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2013. Neshat was awarded the Golden Lion Award, the First International Prize at the 48th Biennale di Venezia (1999), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005), and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2006). In 2009, Neshat directed her first feature-length film, Women Without Men, which received the Silver Lion Award for “Best Director” at the 66th Venice International Film Festival. Dreamers marked her first solo show on the African continent, which exhibited at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg in 2016. That same year, Neshat featured in the New Revolutions: Goodman Gallery at 50 exhibition in Johannesburg and in the Summers group exhibition at Goodman Gallery Cape Town. In 2017, Neshat was awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperiale award for Painting. That same year, Neshat directed Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida at the Salzburg. In 2017, Neshat was awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperiale award for Painting. That same year, Neshat directed Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida at the Salzburg.  The Broad Museum in Los Angeles recently hosted a survey exhibition of the last 25 years of Neshat’s work, which travelled on to Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2021. This year Neshat was the feature artist and Master of Photography at Photo London festival which took place in Somerset House in September. 

Neshat has directed three feature-length films, Women Without Men (2009), which received the Silver Lion Award for Best Director at the 66th Venice International Film Festival,  Looking For Oum Kulthum (2017,) and most recently Land of Dreams (2021) which premiered at the Venice Film Festival.  

The artist lives and works in New York, USA.

Dor Guez

Dor Guez Munayer’s (b. Jerusalem) practice comprises photography, video, installations, and sculpture. Through multimedia performances, Guez transforms art into a vehicle for storytelling. During a recent performance at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, he examined multi-colonial projections looking at different historical resources. His latest overview, “Catastrophe,” at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá in 2022, spanned a wide range of works that reflect the artist’s engagement with his communities and the ever-evolving studies of the Mediterranean Basin.

Guez’s work has been displayed in solo exhibitions at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City (2023); Felix Nussbaum Museum, Osnabrück (2023); MAMBO: Museum of Modern Art, Bogota (2022); Kunst im Kreuzgang, Bielefeld (2021); Futura Gallery, Prague, (2020); American Colony Archive, Jerusalem (2019); MAN Museum, Nuoro (2018); the Museum for Islamic Art, Jerusalem (2017); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2016); the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2015) the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Massachusetts (2013); The Mosaic Rooms, A.M Qattan Foundation, Centre for Contemporary Arab Culture & Art, London (2013) and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2010).

Guez’s works are included in public collections such as Tate Modern London, Center Pompidou Paris, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, LACMA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, The Jewish Museum New York, Rose Art Museum, FRAC collection Marseille, Museum of Modern Art Bogota, and more.

Dor Guez Munayer lives and works between Jaffa and Athens.

El Anatsui

El Anatsui (b. 1944, Anyako, Ghana) is an internationally acclaimed artist who transforms simple materials into complex assemblages that create distinctive visual impact. Anatsui uses resources typically discarded such as liquor bottle caps and cassava graters to create sculptures that defy categorisation. Anatsui’s use of these materials reflects his interest in reuse, transformation, and an intrinsic desire to connect to his continent while transcending the limitations of place. His work interrogates the history of colonialism and draws connections between consumption, waste and the environment. But at the core of Anatsui’s work is his unique formal language that distinguishes his practice.

Anatsui is well-known for large scale sculptures composed of thousands of folded and crumpled pieces of metal sourced from local alcohol recycling stations and bound together with copper wire. These intricate works, which can grow to be massive in scale, are both luminous and weighty, meticulously fabricated yet malleable. He leaves the installations open and encourages the works to take different forms every time they are installed.

In 2023, Anatsui was awarded the highly reputable Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. He was also included in TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2023. His major solo exhibition titled Behind the Red Moon, at the Tate Modern, explored elemental forces interwoven with human histories of power, oppression, dispersion and survival. In 2019, El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale, a major career survey curated by Okwui Enwezor, opened at Haus der Kunst and travelled to Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Kunstmuseum Bern and Guggenheim Bilbao in 2020. In 2015, Anatsui was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, the Venice Biennale’s highest honour. Anatsui’s solo exhibition Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui, was organized by the Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio (2012), and travelled to the Brooklyn Museum, New York and the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa (2013); then to the Bass Museum of Art in Miami, Florida (2014); and concluded at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, California (2015).

Collections include: African Studies Gallery, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria; Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio; Asele Institute, Nimo, Nigeria; The British Museum, London, UK; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, UAE; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Jordan National Gallery of Arts, Amman, Jordan; Musée Ariana, Geneva, Switzerland; and Osaka Foundation of Culture, Osaka, Japan.

Anatsui currently lives and works between Ghana and Nigeria.

Leonardo Drew

Leonardo Drew (b. 1961, Tallahassee, Florida, USA) is known for his significant installations and sculptures which explore the tension between order and chaos. Drew transforms accumulations of raw materials such as wood, scrap metal and cotton to create works that play upon a tension between order and chaos. His surfaces often approach a language of their own, embodying the laboured process of writing oneself into history.

Drew’s work has been seen in major museums worldwide. He was commissioned for a new outdoor project City in the Grass for Madison Square Park in 2019, marking the Madison Square Park Conservancy’s 38th public commission and the artist’s first major public outdoor art project. City in the Grass was presented as a solo exhibition in three museums, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut (2021); Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson (2020); and North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh (2020). In 2022, Drew was elected as a National Academician by the National Academy of Design. Another major new commission featured at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK in 2023. Drew’s mid-career survey, Existed, premiered at the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston in 2009 and travelled to the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Collections include: Tate, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD.
Drew currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

ruby onyinyechi amanze

ruby onyinyechi amanze (b.1982, Port-Harcourt, Nigeria) is a Brooklyn-based artist of Nigerian descent and British upbringing whose creative practices and processes focus on producing mixed media, paper-based drawings and works. Her art draws inspiration from photography, textiles, architecture and printmaking.

amanze earned her B.F.A., Summa Cum Laude, from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and her M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art. In 2012-2013, amanze was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

amanze’s practice builds around questions of how to create drawings that maintain paper’s essence of weightlessness. The large-scaled and multidimensional drawings are part of an ongoing, yet non-linear narrative that employ the malleability of space as the primary antagonist.

A nameless, self-imagined, chimeric universe has simultaneously been positioned between nowhere and everywhere. Using a limited palette of visual elements, including ada the Alien, windows and birds, amanze’s drawings create a non-narrative and expansive world. The construction of this world is largely centered around an interest in the spatial negotiations found in the three-dimensional practices of dance, architecture, and design.

Most recently, amanze completed two-year long residencies at the Queens Museum and as part of the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions Program, both in New York. She has exhibited her work internationally in Lagos, London, Johannesburg and Paris, and nationally at the California African American Museum, the Drawing Center and the Studio Museum of Harlem. In October 2024, she presented a solo exhibition titled ‘Light Blue Violet’ at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg. Continuing her research on inventing and manipulating spaces, her playful configurations occur both within the two-dimensional drawing plane and into a three-dimensional presentation and experience.

Selected group exhibitions: ‘Follow the North Star: Freedom in the Age of Mobility’, International African American Museum, Charleston, SC (2024); ‘A Superlative Palette: Contemporary Black Women Artists,’ Curated by Dexter Wimberly, Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, Charlotte, NC (2024); ‘A Slice through the World: Contemporary Artists’ Drawing,’ The Drawing Room and Modern Art Oxford, London, United Kingdom (2018); ‘Affective Affinities,’ 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2018); ‘Regarding the Figure,’ Studio Museum of Harlem, New York, NY; ‘The Ease of Fiction,’ Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA (2017); ‘the silences between,’ Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa (2017); ‘Drawing Biennial,’ The Drawing Room, London, United Kingdom (2017); ‘Where Do We Stand?: Two Years of Drawing with Open Sessions,’ The Drawing Center, New York, NY (2017).

Collections include: CSS Bard College Hessel Museum; Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt, Germany; National Museum of African Art Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; The Microsoft Art Collection, Redmond, Washington; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY.

amanze lives and works between Philadelphia and Brooklyn, but calls multiple places home.

Cassi Namoda

Cassi Namoda (b. 1988, Maputo, Mozambique) is known for her strong colour palette and narrative approach. Her hybrid narratives are at once wondrous and poignant, everyday and fantastical, archival and current. Namoda’s work transfigures the cultural mythologies and historical narratives of life in post-colonial Africa, particularly those of the artist’s familial home of Mozambique. Namoda’s paintings are highly elusive, drawing upon literary, cinematic and architectural influences that capture the expansiveness of her specifically Luso-African vantage point. The idiosyncratic subjects who appear and reappear in Namoda’s paintings also convey this hybridity: they emerge from African indigenous religions just as much as they spring from Western mythologies. Her work borrows from an art historical canon and arises from vernacular photography in equal measure. While they appear straightforward, her images are conceptually rigorous and portray figures with complex narratives. Namoda is equally attentive to landscape, creating scenes that depict both the rural and the urban through a surreal lens.

In 2024, Namoda presented her first institutional exhibition and most significant on the continent, titled "Is it sunny or cloudy in the land you live on?” at the Norval Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa. Throughout the exhibition Namoda explores landscape in multiple ambiguous other worldly forms.

Notable solo exhibitions include: Life has become a foreign language, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2022); To Live Long is To See Much, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2020); Little is Enough for Those with Love/Mimi Nakupenda, The Royal Academy of Arts, London (2019); and Bar Texas, 1971, Library Street Collective, Detroit (2017).

Group shows include ECHO. Wrapped in Memory, MoMu, Antwerp; When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town (2022 – 2023); American Women, La Patinoire Royale-Galerie Valérie Bach (2020).
Collections include: Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore; MACAAL, Marrakesh; and The Studio Museum; New York.

Namoda lives and works in Italy.

Ghada Amer

Ghada Amer was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1963 and moved to Nice, France when she was eleven years old. She remained in France to further her education and completed both of her undergraduate requirements and MFA at Villa Arson École Nationale Supérieure in Nice (1989), during which she also studied abroad at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts in 1987. In 1991 she moved to Paris to complete a post-diploma at the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques. Following early recognition in France, she was invited to the United States in 1996 for a residency at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has since then been based in New York.

Amer’s wide-ranging practice spans painting, cast sculpture, ceramics, works on paper, and garden and mixed-media installations. Further, she often collaborates with her long-time friend Reza Farkhondeh. Recognising both that women are taught to model behaviors and traits shaped by others, and that art history and the history of painting in particular are shaped largely by expressions of masculinity, Amer’s work actively subverts these frameworks through both aesthetics and content. Her practice explores the complicated nature of identity as it is developed through cultural and religious norms as well as personal longings and understandings of the self.

Amer’s work is in public collections around the world including The Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, NY; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; the Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Samsung Museum, Seoul; among others. Among invitations to prestigious group shows and biennials—such as the Whitney Biennial in 2000 and the Venice Biennales of 1999 (where she won the UNESCO Prize), 2005 and 2007—she was given a midcareer retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York in 2008. Multiple institutions across Marseille, France are currently co-organising a retrospective for 2022 that will travel to the United States and Asia.