With the new team of Victoria Siddall and Jo Stella-Sawicka taking over the reins of Frieze I was looking forward to a bit of girl power and I can happily tell you that I wasn’t disappointed. As I rushed through the aisles on Tuesday morning’s Collector Preview I was accosted by a fierce looking gallerista who demanded my LG G3 Beat smartphone and my Aquazzura Sexy Thing cutout suede sandals. But this was a cheap price to pay in order to try and get my hands on the first item on my Frieze wishlist, Amalia Ulman’s film about the weird symbolism padlocked diaries play that’s available from Arcadia Missa for around £4,000. It’s beyond post-internet and that’s good enough for me.
Meanwhile over at The Approach, Lisa Oppenheim’s work does something pre-internet, mysterious and beautiful with photography. No idea what it exactly that is, despite an intense twenty minutes in conversation with the delightful Jake Miller who himself is pretty mysterious. He intoned about absence and presence whilst someone from Pommery carefully stuck a sticker on the wall announcing they had been shortlisted for best looking booth.
Oppenheim’s work at The Approach is around the US$40,000 mark and definitely worth raiding ArtReview’s beer fund for in my humble opinion. They didn’t win the Best Booth accolade, that went to the lovely Stuart Shave’s Modern Art, and there’s a super picture of them receiving their big Pommery Jeroboam. Leaving that aside, another booth which looked lovely was Rodeo’s, featuring Duncan Campbell’s triptych, Give Us Work, that might appeal to London’s angry hoardes of black cab drivers who idle outside in Regent’s Park as collectors climb into Ubers. I was tempted but in the end I’m asking accounts to release a bit more of my expense money to cough up for Eloise Hawser’s confection of LCD screens that’s all about the origins of cinema. Resistance, 2015, was around the £25K mark.
Finally just to show that I’m not totally gender specific, the last item on my Frieze wishlist is Praneet Soi’s photographic collages, Srinagar II at Experimenter’s booth (also shortlisted for fave stand), priced at around the USD$14,000 mark. Soi’s been hovering beneath the radar for some time with intellectual, visually restrained work but a couple of years hanging out in Kashmir has brought out his more colourful side. The booth is a selection of his works that re-configure traditional Kashmiri visual culture through a digital sensibility.
Online exclusive published on 15 October 2015.
