Frieze has announced the participating artists and historical focus of Frieze Projects at the 2017 edition of the Frieze New York art fair, due to be held on Randall’s Island from 5-7 May. The programme of exhibitions and events, which includes new commissions, will be organised for the sixth consecutive year by the curator Cecilia Alemani, who is also the commissioner of the Italian pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale and the director of High Line Art in New York. Site-specific works have been commissioned from the artists Dora Budor, Elaine Cameron-Weir and Jon Rafman, while the artists Ryan McNamara and Adam Pendleton will participate in the historical tribute, which honours a different pioneering arts space or event each year.
The 2017 Frieze Projects commemorates the experimental exhibition Il Teatro delle Mostre (Theatre of Exhibitions) that was held in May 1968 at the Galleria La Tararuga in Rome, a major platform for contemporary Italian art in the 1960s, founded by the dealer and photographer Plinio de Martiis. The show, which lasted for 28 days, presented a new work by a different artist each day, something that was “a radical and innovative format for that time”, Alemani tells The Art Newspaper. This pace will be imitated in the tribute space, which will show a different commission on each of the four days of the fair, alternating between re-creations of two of the works in Il Teatro delle Mostre and new works by McNamara and Pendleton.
Alemani has chosen to re-stage the 1968 projects of the Italian artists Giosetta Fioroni and Fabio Mauri. Fioroni re-created her bedroom in the gallery space for her performance piece La Spia Ottica (The Optical Spy), in which visitor could take turns observing an actress carry out Fiorini’s daily routines through a peephole. Visitors could directly interact with Mauri’s installation, Luna (Moon), which transformed the gallery into a moonscape—complete with black walls and Styrofoam pearls deep enough to “swim” in—just six months before the Apollo 11 moon landing. Mauri’s estate and Fioroni—who might attend the fair—have both contributed to the re-staging of their works in Il Teatro delle Mostre by providing archival material from the original projects, such as sketches and information on dimensions.
Alemani says that “for this tribute at Frieze, we wanted to maintain that same DIY spirit with contemporary artists whose practices resonate with those of the original artists [in Il Teatro delle Mostre]”. For the moment, details on the new commissions in the tribute space are under wraps, but Alemani says that McNamara and Pendleton will “produce new works of art or situations will activate the space in similar ways [as the historical exhibition], but the structure will be the same—one artist per day”.
Throughout the duration of the fair, meanwhile, Budor, Cameron-Weir and Rafman will present site-specific installations that “explore the relationship between the seeing and being seen”, says Alemani. Cameron-Weir plans to build a military-style bunker on the lawn outside of the north entrance of the fair tent, which she will fill with pieces from her sculptures as well as variety of other materials, only partially visible through a door. Inside the tent, Rafman will turn a booth into a cinema, which will play a new 3-D video series of computer-generated erotica—with a small window, so that viewers can themselves be observed in the act of watching. For Dora Budor’s piece, three doppelgängers of a famous collector—yet to be revealed—will wander throughout the fair.
“So much of art fairs is about seeing—seeing works of art, seeing people and being seen—and I wanted to build on that thought,” says Alemani. “Frieze is one of the most popular events of the year in the city, after all.”