India’s Experimenter wins top stand award at Frieze London.
Portrait of Experimenter team and artists, Frieze London 2023. Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Linda Nylind and Frieze.
Experimenter, the Indian gallery with spaces in Mumbai and Kolkata, won the Frieze London Stand Prize for this year's best gallery presentation. Their exhibition, titled “Do You Know How to Start a Fire,” featured seven intergenerational women artists, including Bani Abidi, Bhasha Chakrabarti, Biraaj Dodiya, Sakshi Gupta, Reba Hore, Radhika Khimji, Afrah Shafiq, and Ayesha Sultana.
Prateek and Priyanka Raja, co-founders of the gallery, commented on the announcement, remarking, “We are delighted to receive the Frieze Stand Prize and are grateful to the jury for recognizing the nuances and intimate connections between the intergenerational women artists that we present at our stand this year. While making exhibitions, we always hope to build dialogues that are generative and propose new ways of seeing. While this is not always easy to do at fairs, we were certain this exhibition would bring forth the multiplicities of voices and practices that are a reflection of our program. The prize underscores our belief that Frieze London is a celebration of the internationalism of global contemporary art.”
According to a recent Frieze statement, the gallery has been considered a “pace-setter” for South Asia, cultivating contemporary art and artists in the region since 2009. This year, the gallery’s stand explores paradoxes and the grid, engaging the artists in a discourse around spatial encounters, landscapes, and power.
For instance, Ayesha Sultana’s work examines liminal spaces illustrated as a grid, whereas Biraaj Dodiya and Radhika Khimji fixate on landscapes that toe the line between abstraction and figuration. The presentation is arranged in several rows, adorned with Sultana’s monochrome works and Bani Abidi’s archival photographs to form a grid, creating a literal representation of the booth's underlying conceptual framework.
Frieze London recognized other galleries as top contenders for the Stand Prize, including Proyectos Ultravioleta in Guatemala City; Taka Ishii in Tokyo and Kyoto, Japan; and Emalin in London.
In addition to the overall prize, Frieze awards a stand prize within the Focus section, a segment of the fair dedicated to emerging artists and galleries. This year, Public Gallery, which was included in Artsy’s roundup of best booths from the fair, was recognized for its presentation of Adam Farah-Saad’s work.
