Frieze part 4: from gorilla to snow white

Time to close the reports about the Frieze Art Fair (see Frieze part 1: The fun of the fair, Frieze part 2: murders at the art fair and Frieze part 3: The Angry Farmers Milk Bar) with plenty of images and almost no text because sometimes that’s all i feel like producing:

David Claerbout, The Homeless Cat, 2011 (Gallery Micheline Szwajcer)

David Claerbout‘s The Homeless Cat deserves a few words of explanation. This interactive, real-time video is synchonized with actual day and night time. The cat on the screen sits, sleeps, gets up, makes a few steps, sits again. However, the atmospheric conditions and the lights in the backdrop are exactly the same as the ones you, the fair (or gallery) visitor, would experience outside at this very moment. If it rains in your city, the cat will stand in front of a city where it rains. If it’s night wherever you are, it will be night on the screen as well. The whole effect is controlled by webcams and clever programming. The Homeless Cat is a video that has no end. That said, i found the video absorbing even before i knew about the whole system behind it.

Alexey Kallima, Free Fall, 2011 (Regina London and Moscow)

I remembered seeing Alexey Kallima‘s large scale painting of Chechen Women’s Team of Parachute Jumping in New York 4 years ago and it’s the one work i’d have bought at Frieze if i’d have been rich enough. Kallima’s going to have a solo show at Regina Gallery in London on 23 November – 22 December 2012. I call that a fair consolation prize!

Marcel Van Eeden, Aus der Serie Sammlung Boryna (ca. 1930), 2009