Frieze Editor’s Picks is a fortnightly column wherein a frieze editor shares their suggestions for what to look at, learn and hearken to.
Chappell Roan’s ‘The Giver’ Marketing campaign
It took months after Chappell Roan carried out her new lesbian nation single ‘The Giver’ on Saturday Night time Stay – crooning in a gingham ensemble that she ‘get[s] the job performed’ – till the official launch date (13 March) was introduced. In between, she launched a campy promotional marketing campaign to tide her followers over. The popstar – beloved for her sapphic bangers and high-femme drag appears – seems as a dentist, plumber, lawyer and development employee on metropolis billboards and fliers distributed all through the US; her companies are marketed with taglines like ‘YOUR WIFE’S HOT! I’LL FIX HER AIR CONDITIONER’. While you name the hotline listed (620-HOT-TOGO) and comply with the star-operator’s telephone tree, the maintain music teases snippets of her tune. Roan’s joyful, queer sense of play, paired along with her vocal help for LGBTQ+ rights, gives slightly mild in darkish instances.
Sin Wai Kin, The Time of Our Lives (2024)
I’ve at all times discovered sitcoms a bit unnerving: the predictable and plodding plotlines, the way in which even viewers’ laughter is preordained. Toronto-born, London-based artist Sin Wai Kin takes the weirdness of the style and runs with it in The Time of Our Lives (2024), a faux-sitcom at the moment having its US debut of their exhibition ‘The Finish Time!’ at Canal Initiatives in New York. The 2-channel video follows V Sin, a drag queen clad in a white minidress, and Wai King, a vermilion-haired stud in a blazer, as they teleport out and in of a movie set made to resemble a suburban residence. Typically freezing or glitching, they chaotically whirl by life milestones: marriage, child, commencement. (The Storyteller, a cosmic character surrounded by out-of-synch clocks, sometimes interjects; everyone seems to be performed by the artist, who obtained their begin performing drag.) The couple discusses quantum entanglement and theories of time (with a nod to queer time), eliciting viewers laughter on the display reverse with one-liners like ‘I need to select a unique previous.’ When a countdown lands us in a brand new world, they get a standing ovation.
Hito Steyerl, Medium Sizzling (2025)
Set to be launched by Verso in Might, Hito Steyerl’s Medium Sizzling: Pictures within the Age of Warmth (2025) contains 11 careening, tangent-rich texts on artwork and expertise, one among which approximates a choose-your-own-adventure recreation. The German artist-theorist wrote the e book between 2017 and 2024, and it covers ample floor – starting along with her coinage of a variant on German filmmaker Harun Farocki’s ‘operational pictures’, which she phrases ‘da/mages’, or pictures which can be used as knowledge to feed harmful practices like warfare, extractivism and surveillance. With a title that riffs on Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan’s notions of ‘scorching’ and ‘cool’ media, Medium Sizzling creatively speculates on numerous types of warmth: the hyperlinks between synthetic intelligence and international warming; an artwork-incinerating blaze that could possibly be partly attributable to unlawful cryptocurrency mining; Prometheus syndrome amongst AI executives. Significantly with the rise of generative AI, pictures are altering; Steyerl’s e book gives up theoretical instruments and language to grapple with what meaning.
Fundamental picture: Sin Wai Kin, The Time of Our Lives (element), 2024, movie nonetheless. Initiated by Accelerator and co-produced with Kunsthall Trondheim, Canal Initiatives and Blindspot Gallery. Supported by Vince Guo. Courtesy: the artist
