FLEETING MOMENTS OF FRIEZE LONDON
An international art show, whether a Biennale, Triennale, Art Fair, or Art Summit, is an occasion to bring galleries, collectors, viewers, and artists together. It makes inroads between institutions, individuals, practices, and schools of thoughts in a brief period at a single venue. Venice Biennale, Documenta, Art Basel, and Frieze are some of the most sought after events in the world of visual art.
This year’s Frieze London was distinct due to various reasons. Pakistani artists have been participating in this prestigious exhibition; for instance, Rashid Rana’s work Fractured Moment, was included in Chemould Prescott’s space at the Frieze Rooms, London. His digital prints alluded to the trajectories – and tragedies of our times. Reference to the genocide of civilians of Gaza, manged through the blazing trails of bombing jets, thus substituting the exhibition space in London to the location of cruel and condemned assault of Israel Defence Forces on the occupied land of Palestine. However, Rana’s artwork, created in the context of the Middle Eastern war, in an intuitive way predated the brief war between India and Pakistan.
Large scale art exhibitions, known for their complexities, diversities – and unevenness, provide opportunity to glimpse works, which remained hidden in galleries’ vaults, auctioneers’ cellars, and collectors’ storages. Here a visitor is able to access art produced across continents in one evening.
The evening of 14th October was a grand affair which attracted a large crowd, rushing towards Regent’s Park London, the location of Frieze 2026, where works of contemporary artists were displayed along with the masters of modern art. Salvador Dali, Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, Alice Neel, Georg Baselitz, Julian Schanbel, William Kentridge and many other names were included there.
For Pakistan, this year’s edition held another significance. A considerable number of artists, born, studied, or living in Pakistan showed their works. Anwar Jalal Shemza’s intricate works on paper, led an informed viewer to recognize the mark of a man, split in two hemispheres, and trying to locate his roots. For Shemza, a writer, besides being a painter, Urdu text served as a means to reach – his place of origin. An underground passage, not visible in one’s daily routine and tiring life, but takes a person to the long abandoned station – in a quick way, shedding his/her anonymity. Much like riding a tube from one station to another, through underground tunnels, which represents a living yet alienated space, but also another, thriving, private and parallel world.
Other artists from Pakistan, such as Salman Toor, Ali Kazim, Suleman Khilji, Zaam Arif secured their spaces at the Frieze London. Showing with different galleries, they projected the image of a country, not reduced to a narrow definition, description, representation, or interpretation, their creations confirmed how a nation thinks in diverse directions, following the layout of a busy railway junction, where one train is departing, another is arriving, some changing tracks simultaneously. Or resembling the in-flight magazine of an airline, that informs a passenger the routes of various aircrafts taking off and landing on different ports around the world at the same hour. Cross overs, long hauls fights, parallel planes, these fabricate an unimaginable, but physical world.
A highlight of Frieze London 2026, was the solo representation of Sadequain. Recognized for his calligraphy and paintings; the flow of his brush, scratches on dark surfaces disclose the way an artist moves, mould, and mutate an image, a product to convey his/her personality. Sadeqauin’s amorphic shapes, cacti like forms, and lanky figures, are not only connected to the latter half of the twentieth-century, but due to their content comment upon the contemporary conditions. Represented by Grosvenor Gallery London at its solo booth of Frieze Mater, his artworks remind of a future that was still present in our distant past.