“I am not used to asking for help, but on what kind of a ground am I standing?” – Etel Adnan
In the July/August issue of frieze, Etel Adnan contemplates horizons in an exclusive excerpt from her forthcoming book, Shifting the Silence; Moyra Davey and Kate Zambreno consider Nadine Gordimer’s haunting proposition “to write as if you were dead”; and Evelyn Taocheng Wang answers our questionnaire.
Roundtable: The World from rue Madame
“I didn’t need to write in French anymore, I was going to paint in Arabic.” A lifelong migrant between countries, languages and media, Etel Adnan has always understood that the words we use, like art itself, never comprise neutral ground. In this dossier, Negar Azimi, Omar Berrada, frieze senior editor Pablo Larios and Joan Retallack take a close look at her practice.
Conversation: Moyra Davey and Kate Zambreno
“Shame is only ugly when it’s hidden. It can be breathtakingly beautiful when a writer puts it out there without fanfare,” Moyra Davey tells Kate Zambreno. The artist and author—both of whom published new books this spring—speak about diary-keeping and the intimacy and setbacks of writing, contending that art is beautiful when it reveals what is hidden.
Also featuring:
An essay by Gary Zhexi Zhang on the parafictional artworks of Cooking Sections, Goldin+Senneby, Sean Raspet and Shengping Zheng, which sit between ecology and industry. A profile by Brian Dillon on the choreographer Michael Clark, who combined classical training, punk, pop and outré fashion to recast London in the 1980s in his own image. 1500 words by poet Bernadette Mayer on the ever-changing colours of the alphabet. And Lynne Tillman responds to a photograph from An-My Lê’s Small Wars (1999–2002).
Columns: Games
Darran Anderson remembers escaping into the classic arcade game Street Fighter II (1991) during the Troubles in Northern Ireland; Orit Gat considers sports writing as a visual experience not dissimilar to writing about art; Simon Denny and Joanna Pope update the world’s first socialist board game Class Struggle (1978); Jennifer Kabat takes a close look at Lynn Hershman Leeson’s use of avatars and antibodies; and Azby Brown asks: what went wrong for Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic Stadium?
Plus, 21 reviews from around the world, including Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI at de Young Museum in San Francisco and Tell Me About Yesterday Tomorrow at the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism.
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