The Frieze Projects program at Frieze New York will feature six new artworks, both inside the fair and around Randall’s Island Park, Manhattan. Curated by Cecilia Alemani, Frieze Projects is the non-profit program of artist commissions realized at Frieze New York. This year, the program includes sculptural environments and performative spaces involving intricate mazes, intimate hideouts and room-size installations. Frieze New York takes place May 14–17, 2015 and has been sponsored by Deutsche Bank since its launch in 2012.
The artists participating in the Frieze Projects program at Frieze New York this year are: Korakrit Arunanondchai, Pia Camil, Samara Golden, Aki Sasamoto and Allyson Vieira. The program will also feature a special tribute to the Flux-Labyrinth, an installation conceived in Berlin in 1976 by George Maciunas, in collaboration with other Fluxus artists.
The six projects will be scattered both inside and outside the fair – built among booths, in common areas, or hidden within the fair’s layout. The artists choosing to create clandestine rooms that host participatory spaces include Aki Sasamoto, who will construct a personality test in the form of a three-dimensional maze. Another hidden space will be realized by Samara Golden who plans to build an underground sculptural environment that reveals the subterranean features of the fair. Other projects will interrupt the fabric of the fair itself, with Korakrit Arunanondchai installing a number of massage chairs throughout the fair, upholstered in his signature material of bleached denim, which will be free for visitors to use. Pia Camil will make a similarly conspicuous intervention by freely distributing a series of wearable fabrics to fair visitors to employ as items of clothing. Outside the fair, Allyson Vieira will install a colossal broken column made of recycled bales of plastic.
As in the previous editions of Frieze New York, Frieze Projects features a tribute to an alternative space or an artist-run project that has radically transformed the way we experience contemporary art. Following homages to the underground space Fashion Moda (2012), the artists’ restaurant FOOD (2013) and the artist project Al’s Grand Hotel (2014), this year the Frieze tribute will be devoted to the Flux-Labyrinth. For this homage at Frieze New York 2015, a group of contemporary artists have been invited to create new environments, sculptures and situations that will be installed in a labyrinth of narrow corridors and rooms where obstructions and hurdles turn the experience of traversing the space into a joyful and surreal exercise.
Curator Cecilia Alemani said: ‘For the fourth edition of Frieze Projects in New York, I have invited a group of international artists to create new spaces, both physical and fictional, places to relax, play and explore. All together, this year’s Frieze Projects will feature temporary architectures and intimate spaces dispersed throughout the fabric of the fair’.
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