This week, we turn our eyes to Frieze – Frieze Projects, a program of artists’ commissions realized annually at Frieze New York, more exactly – and recommend everyone go try one of Korakrit Arunanondchai’s massage chairs, enter Samara Golden’s underground sculpture or try to find their way through the tribute Flux-Labyrinth.
1. Korakrit Arunanondchai
Artist Korakrit Arunanondchai is interested in creating immersive environments where the viewers can lose themselves in a multi-sensory space. Distributed throughout the fair, a series of high-tech massage chairs will welcome visitors, allowing them to relax and take a break from the vertiginous rhythm of the fair.
Covered with the artist’s signature material – bleached denim – the chairs will function as a place of rest and contemplation for which the artist will also realize an hypnotic sound track, based upon a conversation he and his twin brother, Korapat, had while walking through Frieze Art Fair in London in 2014.
2. Pia Camil
Pia Camil has conceived a project that will function as a portable environment. Inspired by Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolé – a series of capes, flags and banners made to be worn as ‘habitable paintings’ – Camil’s project will consist of a series of wearable fabrics distributed freely to the fair’s visitors.
Camil’s pieces of fabric are designed to allow for various versatile uses including clothing – such as robes or ponchos – and more utilitarian functions – such as picnic blankets, table cloths and sheets. Disseminated within the context of the fair, Camil’s fabric pieces will require the direct participation of the viewers, quietly emphasizing one of the main characteristics of the experience of art fairs, where the act of looking at art is often as important as the act of looking at others and distinguishing oneself from them.
Fabrics will be given out between 12–1pm and 3–4pm each day.
3. Samara Golden
Los Angeles-based artist Samara Golden is interested in unveiling the different components and stratifications of the fair, physical and social and psychological. For Frieze Projects, Golden will build a secret room underneath the tent and only visible from the outside.
The hidden chamber will be surrounded by mirrors and will feature a sculptural environment, which integrates the infra- structures of the fair, with its supporting pillars, air conditioning pipes and electricity cables all becoming part of the work. As in an archeological site, Golden’s installation will reveal the underbelly of the fair, which is usually invisible to fairgoers.
4. Aki Sasamoto
Japanese artist Aki Sasamoto will realize a three-dimensional version of a personality test and multiple-choice questionnaire.
A maze-like structure built within the grid of the galleries’ booths, Sasamoto’s project will consist of several rooms where viewers will face a choice between two objects or situations. The viewers’ choices will then lead them through a succession of rooms and doors which will take them to the exit, where they will discover which personality suits them best.
5. Allyson Vieira
Outside the fair, Allyson Vieira will present a sculpture using bails of compressed post-industrial plastic as colossal building blocks to evoke a collapsed structure.
These blocks are a 21st-century commodity, a new raw material, created for export to China where they will be reprocessed into plastic consumer goods for sale in American big-box stores. Positioned on the green lawn in front of the fair, Vieira’s sculpture will act as a reminder of the survival of classical forms even in the most prosaic of realities, whilst acknowledging the inevitable degradation of materials over time.
6. Tribute to Flux-Labyrinth (1976/2015)
A participatory, 200-foot-long labyrinth where viewers have to overcome a series of tactile obstacles and absurd obstructions, the original Flux-Labyrinth was designed for a show at the René Block gallery in New York in 1975, but was only realized the following year at the Akademie der Kunste in Berlin.
For this tribute at Frieze New York, a group of contemporary artists have been invited to create new environments, sculptures and situations that will be installed in a maze structure: several narrow corridors and rooms where obstructions and hurdles turn the experience of traversing the space into a joyful and surreal exercise.
