Abbas Zahedi’s new work Waiting With {Sonic Support} will play host to an Open Mic each day of the fair. Located beside the entrance to Frieze in Regent’s Park, Abbas’ structure will be activated by performances between 12-16 October 2022, 3-4:30pm (LONDON) | 10-11:30am (EASTERN)
Frieze named Abbas Zahedi as the winner of the 2022 Frieze Artist Award, realized in partnership with Forma for the fourth consecutive year. Established in 2013, the award provides an emerging artist with the platform to debut an ambitious new commission on the occasion of Frieze London. Previous recipients of the Frieze Artist Award include Himali Singh Soin (2019), Alberta Whittle (2020) and Sung Tieu (2021).
Waiting With {Sonic Support}, 2022, is a prototype for a new form of civic infrastructure; conflating multiple sites: a bus stop - more generally, a public waiting area - a DIY bandstand, and a public support space. Responding to the particularities of Frieze London, Abbas Zahedi’s site-sensitive installation activates the fair’s threshold, to establish a speculative transport system for utopian daydreaming between its inside and outside.
Developed from Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of bus stops as places to ‘achieve practical and theoretical participation in common being’, one first encounters Waiting With {Sonic Support} whilst approaching Frieze London. Echoing the form of a Central Asian Soviet-Era bus stop, Abbas’ co-designed waiting zone is a site of ensemble; a place where one can depart from the isolated individuality of our contemporary age - Sartre’s ‘plurality of isolations’ - by convening with others in a common interconnected space.
During Frieze London, this temporary structure will serve as a ‘metatopian’ performative environment, that hosts a number of open mic activations. Selected through an open submissions process, these open mics not only extend a gesture of conviviality to other artists and performers but allude to Abbas’ early creative practice as an emcee, spoken-word poet and community organiser. Embracing the legacies of DIY and pirate radio, each of these open-mic ensembles will be broadcast live into the heart of the Frieze London tent. Here, an indoor version of the installation will allow those inside to tune into the active space outside.
Each of the silk and resin works in the exhibition is titled after a song or film. I chose famous American romantic-crime films where the two protagonists are on the run, head over heels, and against the world. My parents used to listen to the songs on the playlist throughout my childhood, when it felt like they were most in love. These songs invoke immense feelings in me and encapsulate the sentiment of the show most accurately. There are certain songs that can make you travel in time, taking you back to a specific emotional memory. Certain songs can simultaneously trigger overwhelming beauty and pain. The word "nostalgia" is formed by a Greek compound, consisting of νόστος (nóstos), meaning "homecoming," a Homeric word, and ἄλγος (álgos), meaning "pain" or "ache." I understand the word to describe the feeling one experiences when a particular core emotional wound is activated, a historic ache that comes from a deep longing to return to a place or moment in time. For me, nostalgia is the trauma of the awareness of the passing of time and its inevitability. Time is a place you can never go home to. Time is something you can never have. I think songs can approximate what once was a personal present. These songs are like photographs to me. I can listen to them and come into contact with a past emotional landscape while concurrently experiencing the loss of it, again and again, on loop.
In 2020 Heavy Breathing presented: "To Your Under", by Ross Simonini, read by Audrey Vignoles. "To Your Under" is a brief exercise in pedal dexterity, neural elasticity, subliminal reality, and fluid personality. For this experience, you will need a chair, a sheet of paper, and a pen.