Frieze Editor’s Picks is a column during which a frieze editor shares their suggestions for what to look at, learn and hearken to.
Akshi Singh, In Defence of Leisure: Experiments in Residing with Marion Milner (2025)
In 1934, British psychoanalyst Marion Milner wrote a landmark textual content, A Lifetime of One’s Personal, in response to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Personal (1929). Milner’s ebook raised numerous theoretical questions, together with: How ought to we spend our time? And the way can we perceive our emotional wishes? Nearly a century later, Akshi Singh’s lately printed In Defence of Leisure advances Milner’s arguments, suggesting that, with a purpose to dwell life to the fullest, we have to find time for leisure, so we have now the house during which to grasp what it’s that excites us on the purest degree about being alive. These might appear to be huge questions however Singh’s accessible prose and mental prowess make this ebook a necessary learn. Singh is emotionally attuned to what leads us to a lifetime of uncertainty and obligation and, by means of the work of Milner, as effectively different psychoanalytical influences, akin to feminist theorist Jacqueline Rose, implores us to really feel and assume extra deeply. I will likely be handing copies of this ebook to everybody I like this summer time.
Daniel Soares, Dangerous for a Second (2024)
Many cities world wide are going through a housing disaster: property hypothesis and tourism have priced out native residents, forcing them to maneuver additional away from their locations of labor in addition to from their households and communities. Daniel Soares’s Dangerous for a Second, which obtained a particular point out within the brief movie class at Cannes in 2024, focuses on the complicity of these on the opposite facet of the equation: city planners and designers compelled to make moral selections that might outcome within the displacement of individuals, histories and tales. Dangerous for a Second’s protagonist, architect Adriano (performed by João Villas Boas), battles his conscience as city planners and property builders search to demolish an condo block, driving out the present occupants – predominantly single moms. What follows is a curious brief meditation on the darkly farcical moments of millennial workplace life and team-building occasions, with lovely cinematography animating town of Lisbon, now more and more residence to digital nomads. Whereas cities have at all times tailored and adjusted over time, Soares asks us to think about who’s left behind – and at what price.
London Pirate Radio Adverts 1984–1993, Vol. 1 (2020/25)
Whereas scrolling by means of my Instagram feed just a few weeks in the past, I got here throughout some grainy footage of Kingsland Highway and Dalston Lane in east London, shot by a passenger in a transferring automotive. These are each roads I stroll alongside every day, but the scenes depicted – bar Ray Walker’s famed Hackney Peace Carnival Mural (1983), subsequent to what’s now Dalston Curve Backyard, and a passing 38 bus – had been unfamiliar to me. The soundtrack to this footage, which featured a slogan imploring listeners to ‘Get your automotive tuned!’, is certainly one of a number of adverts and idents heard on London’s pirate radio stations between 1984 and 1993. What may appear to be an uncommon audio assortment proves to be a time capsule from one other period: there are adverts for hotlines to assist ravers discover love within the days earlier than on-line relationship and for nightclubs in Clapton with telephone numbers to name if you happen to had additional enquiries. Compiled by document label Demise Is Not the Finish (additionally the identify of their NTS radio present), these idents and adverts left me unusually wistful for one more, extra analogue model of town that has been my residence for a decade.
Akshi Singh’s In Defence of Leisure: Experiments in Residing with Marion Milner is printed by Jonathan Cape within the UK and accessible to buy. Daniel Soares’s Dangerous for a Second is offered to look at on-line on MUBI. Demise Is Not the Finish’s London Pirate Radio Adverts 1984–1993, Vol. 1 will likely be re-issued on cassette in June 2025.
Principal picture: Daniel Soares, Dangerous for a Second, 2024, movie nonetheless (element). Courtesy: MUBI
