Frieze #212

Issue 212 July–August 2020

‘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 Anan 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.

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).

Plus, a series of columns on games – from Darran Anderson’s memories of Street Fighter II to Simon Denny and Joanna Pope’s reworking of the world’s first socialist board game Class Struggle (1978) – and 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.