Frieze London 2024: And The Strokes Come Like Speech

Our curation titled And the Strokes Come Like Speech presents the artwork as an archaeological site, as similarly load-bearing to an edifice – a material construction, a complex system of beliefs. This historiographic impulse in art practices can move the artwork beyond the archive, often implicating the very sources of its inquiry. As the construction of an artwork becomes the site of its own excavation, it prioritizes material traces as a means of disclosure and discovery, helping generate dialogues around alternate histories, marginalized voices, existential chasms and societal fractures.

 

The artists in our curation share such ideological predicaments, revealed by the intensity with which they render their mark-making, whether in the photograph, painting or sculpture; a pulse often obtained by an intuitive methodology of layering and erasure towards the idea and/or image. Here we present a curation of artworks that overrun their surfaces with multi-dimensionality and material depth.

 

The artists in this presentation are included in major private and institutional collections around the world, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Peabody Essex Museum, USA; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan; National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai and Delhi; British Museum, London; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi; Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; Kunsthaus Museum, Zurich; Smithsonian Institution, Washington – among others, along with several major monographs and publications to their credit. Gauri Gill received the prestigious Prix Pictet Photography and Sustainability Award in 2023. Nalini Malani was awarded the Kyoto Prize laureate in the arts and philosophy in 2023, as well as the prestigious Joan Miró prize in 2019.