Ecologies of Attention

“I don’t think it used to be this popular — now it’s cool to be seen at Frieze.”

The comment stayed with me, not as a criticism but as a sign of transformation. Frieze London and Masters have expanded and its reach has stretched beyond the art world’s inner circles. Its growth carries both promise and unease — inviting more people into the experience of art itself, yet risking it becoming more of a place to be seen rather than a place to experience art. But this tension is interesting, since it mirrors the wider condition of our time, where conflict and connection, displacement and belonging, constantly negotiate with one another.

This year, that negotiation felt visible. There were corners of conversation occurring between the booths, and a questioning of interest lingering between works of art. Frieze London has become not just a place where art is shown, but where it is lived: through gestures, encounters, and the fragile sense of home that flickers, briefly, between strangers.

The fair operates like an urban microcosm — a temporary city of white corridors, curated lighting, and invisible architecture designed to frame attention. It is both neutral and theatrical. Within it, every gesture becomes semiotic: a collector’s nod, a curator’s pause, the clicks of iPhone cameras. The fair becomes a theatre of movement where art, people, and commerce circulate with one another. 

In this choreography, spectatorship also becomes performative. To look is no longer passive; it is a form of participation. Each encounter, each photograph, each overheard conversation forms part of the fair’s social text. The public’s movement through the booths feels like a collective study of how art circulates — economically, emotionally, and intellectually. We witness not only artworks, but the systems that sustain and surround them.

The result is an atmosphere that finds itself both exhilarating and disorienting. Frieze London’s openness has brought new audiences, but also new expectations. The desire to belong, to witness, to understand, merges with the quiet fatigue of overstimulation. Yet within that feeling lies something rare: a sense of shared curiosity. 

Focus and Fragility

At Bombon, Lara Fluxà’s installation turned from the psychological to the systemic. Her practice depicts ecological structures that symbolically show the architecture between power and nature. Inspired by the infrastructures of power plants, Fluxà shows systems through her work that incorporate symbols of industrial design and biological processes. Her sculptures inhabit a space between organism and machine, exposing the anxieties around this interdependence. How easily systems of control slip into collapse. Her work reminds us that the ecological crisis is a mirror of human intervention and need. 

At Kayokoyuki, Daichi Takagi's work explored emotion and perception. In our conversation, he spoke about how his work is inspired by nature, these pieces specifically from rocks and moons and how that can parallel to the small and the cosmic. Two of his paintings were linked by a single rock: one rendering it monumental, another transforming it into a moon behind a grove of trees. He explained that while many people contemplate the moon, few pause to see the stones beneath their feet. Through oil on canvas, he asks us to notice the ordinary, to rediscover the details of what we already know and are exposed to daily. His works are not depictions of the world, but interpretations of how we see it, containing layers of memory, emotion, and perception. 

Returning Currents: Material, Memory, and Myth

Returning galleries that stood out for their engagement with critical thought, social reflection, and the ways art can question its own context included Brunette Coleman which presented paintings by Emma Rose Schwartz. Her work contained layered, intimate, and slightly haunting depictions of girlhood and childhood. Born in Toronto and based in New York, Schwartz works create texture that resemble aged diaries or weathered wallpaper, which make you feel connected to nostalgia, the past and memories. Her figures often appear in doubles, fractions of the 'self', reminiscing themes of duality - exploring the relationship between the past, future, and present. Themes of womanhood and domestic life surrounds her work: ranch-style houses, windows, interiors that blur into psyche. Her paint sometimes behaves like time itself, opaque in one moment, translucent in the next. Each canvas becomes a site of interior excavation, where girlhood and womanhood, private and public, converge in quiet tension. Her works are not recollections of the past but reconstructions of how we remember, how we grow, and how the act of painting can become a form of remembering.

Emma Rose Schwartz, Trundle (Front)

(detail), 2025. 

Cally Spooner

Screen Test for the Psoas Muscle, 2023/2024

Existing internal walls, CSP-1180 semi-gloss paint, white emulsion paint, water, applied with horizontal, vertical, and circular movement

Environmental dimensions

Edition of 3 + 2 AP (#3/3)

Photography: Polina Kravchenko

 © perediza 2026