Prada Mode brings Martine Syms to Melrose
For 48 hours, Prada Mode, the Italian fashion house’s itinerant art fair social club, took residence in Melrose’s Chinese restaurant-cum-nightlife hotspot Genghis Cohen. The centrepiece of the two-day event was Martine Syms’s HelLA World (a portmanteau of “hell” and “LA”), a commissioned installation that the artist described as “an interactive textual and visual play”. Monitors mounted indoors and outdoors on metal frames displayed both surveillance footage and scrolling texts that simulated the dynamics of a group chat. This was Prada Mode’s seventh artist commission, following previous projects with artists including Theaster Gates and Damien Hirst. By day, the installation offers fair-going VIPs a lounge to partake in cocktails and kale salad and, by night, transforms into an A-list nightclub. Visitors included the actors Jeff Goldblum and Vanessa Hudgens, and the art world’s own Kimberly Drew and Tyler Mitchell.
Art Made Between Opposite Sides works with migrants in Tijuana Photo: Eric Thayer
Supporting the community, pot by pot
“I wanted to organise something that was really expansive in the way that we think about art and the ways that art can address the most pressing issues in our city,” says Tanya Aguiñiga, the artist and activist. With the support of Santa Barbara’s Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation, Aguiñiga created the BIPOC Exchange in a garden adjacent to Frieze’s venue. There, ten organisations are raising money for various artistic pursuits where art might provide a means of financial support: the People’s Pottery Project, for example, puts the proceeds from selling ceramics towards job training and placements for formerly incarcerated women, trans and non-binary people.
Refik Anadol is using data-gathering artificial intelligence to create art Photo: Eric Thayer
NFT dreamscapes IRL
The Turkish artist Refik Anadol hosted a behind-the-scenes tour of his new studio in Los Angeles, where he and a team are visualising unseen worlds with works that manipulate data gathered through artificial intelligence. Anadol achieved the auction record for an NFT (non-fungible token) collection sold in Asia last year with a work that was partly previously presented as an immersive experience, catapulting him into the higher ranks of the art world. He says a collector who “couldn’t sleep because he needed to put my artwork on his wall” prompted him to create “works that could live in a physical space, be enjoyed and later become a memory in the blockchain”. The event was organised by Bettina Korek and Hans Ulrich Obrist of the Serpentine in London with Kathleen Breitman, the co-founder of Tezos, a decentralised open-source platform striving to introduce greener alternatives to the blockchain.
A stitch in time: SONOP/SONAF explores Thania Petersen’s heritage Photo: Gabriella Angeleti
Collectors crash Nicodim cabana
At the poolside of the Felix Art Fair, Thania Petersen made a notable splash. The South African artist’s intricately hand-embroidered tapestry SONOP/SONAF (2021), featured in Nicodim Gallery’s cabana, caught the attention of the Miami collectors Don and Mera Rubell before being acquired by the Ohio-based collector Pete Scantland. The work’s rich, allegorical imagery represents recurring themes in Petersen’s practice: colonisation, migration and her own Sufi Muslim heritage. “She’s a triple-threat,” says Ben Lee Ritchie Handler, Nicodim’s director, noting Petersen’s work in performance and video in addition to tapestry. The gallery, which recently started representing the artist, is planning to show her work at The Armory Show in New York and in a solo exhibition in Los Angeles, both in September.
Wishful Thinking takes visitors to Walt Disney Concert Hall down the rabbit hole Courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery
Frank Gehry’s encore performance at Disney Hall
Visitors to the Walt Disney Concert Hall can enjoy a colourful new installation by the building’s architect, Frank Gehry. The work is based on the memorable scene in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland wherein our young heroine Alice comes upon the Mad Hatter and the March Hare are having a crazed afternoon tea. In Gehry’s interpretation, Wishful Thinking (2022), 11 bigger-than-life-sized figures made of brightly hued metal are gathered around an internally lit table. There will be cards, teacups and some faces set upon the abstract sculptures for us to guess who is who. When completed in 2003, the exuberant folds of Gehry’s futuristic metallic architecture helped bring downtown Los Angeles back to life. The public can see the art for free during tour and performance times (until 20 March).