Fukushima vegetable soup on menu at Frieze London art fair

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/sep/25/fukushima-vegetable-soup-frieze-london-art-fair

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Visitors to the Frieze art fair in London will have an interesting dilemma: should they eat the freshly made Japanese soup containing vegetables flown in from Fukushima?

The soup is an art project in a new Frieze Live initiative at this year’s fair, the final one overseen by the co-founders Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp.

Brothers Tomoo and Ei Arakawa, artists who work under the name United Brothers, will present a piece called Does This Soup Taste Ambivalent? It will involve their mother, also in London, making a soup from vegetables grown in the region of Fukushima, scene of the 2011 nuclear disaster.

Frieze organisers stress that no one will be harmed. All the ingredients will be certified safe by the Japanese Farmers’ Association, but clearly there will be people in two minds.

“I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to eat it,” admitted Slotover. “It’s not like we’re recommending it.”

The Japanese piece is one of six projects chosen from more than 100 galleries who pitched proposals for the new Live section of Frieze London.

It joins Frieze Projects, Frieze sculpture park, Frieze Talks, Frieze Film and Frieze Masters – selling art created before 2000, and even, this year, a 7,000-year-old example of neolithic art. They collectively make up what has become one of the world’s most important art fairs attracting everyone from hedge fund billionaires to empty-pocketed art students.

It will be the 12th edition of Frieze and while it will not be any bigger – its size is constrained by its home in Regent’s Park – it might be quieter, with organisers starting the fair a day earlier and reducing ticket sales to avoid overcrowding.

It will be Slotover and Sharp’s final Frieze London, they announced on Thursday. They are stepping down from running London and its sister fair in New York, handing the reins to their colleague Victoria Siddall.

Slotover said he and Sharp, who created Frieze magazine in 1991 before setting up the fair in 2003, would remain with Frieze but work on new things. “We are still very proud founders and owners of the fairs and the magazines. We have some ideas for new projects that need a lot of development … but I can’t really say more than that at the moment.”

They leave the fairs in rude health. While not to everybody’s taste – the conspicuous exhibition of vast wealth is not always a pleasant sight – the fairs are a popular and important part of the contemporary art calendar.

This year, more than 160 contemporary art galleries from around the world, will be showing work for sale. Artists on display will include Mark Wallinger, who is creating his version of Freud’s study for Hauser & Wirth, while the Gateshead-based Workplace Gallery will have a solo presentation of works by the sculptor Eric Bainbridge.

The Frieze Projects strand is where some of the more outlandish events often take place, and this year proves no exception. The Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans will install a work at Frieze’s neighbours London zoo, a place he regularly visits, said Frieze projects curator Nicola Lees. The plan is for an undisclosed neon work to be installed over the Regent’s canal between the aviary and the African dogs enclosure.

Another project will explore the life and career of the late Andy Kaufman, one of the most unpredictable and anarchic comedians, still best known by some as the actor who played dim-but-lovable Latka Gravas from Taxi. The artist Jonathan Berger is proposing a number of Kaufman-related pieces including a daily orchestra performance of a lost piece of music, an overture that was performed at Kaufman’s Carnegie Hall concert of 1979.

• Frieze Art Fair takes place in Regent’s Park from 15-18 October.