Frieze Week Spills Across London in Sound, Painting, and Performance

Frieze London and Frieze Masters return to The Regent's Park from October 14 through 18, but some of the week's most ambitious work is unfolding beyond the fairgrounds. Across museums, galleries, hotels, shops, and public spaces, artists are using the city's compressed attention span to test what an exhibition can be.

The strongest projects resist a single Frieze Week formula. Justin Caguiat's Change Ringing at Serpentine South moves between painting, sculpture, printmaking, sound, and film. Heat-sensitive pigments make some paintings physically responsive to their surroundings, while bronze bells shaped like flowers and seeds turn time and atmosphere into active materials. The exhibition remains on view through January 10, 2027.

Sound takes over the Turbine Hall

At Tate Modern, Lebanese artist and composer Tarek Atoui approaches architecture as an instrument. His Hyundai Commission, Hold, suspends custom-built instruments, resonant sculptures, electronics, and percussion throughout the Turbine Hall. Visitors encounter the work through vibration and bodily movement as much as conventional listening, while performances will continually alter the installation through April 11, 2027.

Elsewhere, art becomes mobile. For A World Within, CART Department and artist Kozo have transformed six vehicles from The Peninsula London's fleet into traveling canvases. Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, and other cars carry Kozo's intricate mix of British nature, London history, and surreal imagery through the city until October 31.

Painting turns personal

Two museum presentations use portraiture to test the distance between public image and private life. Salman Toor's Someone Like You brings together 19 paintings made since 2019 for the Pakistani-American artist's first European solo exhibition. His luminous green interiors hold friendship, desire, unease, and belonging in the same frame. The show runs at The Courtauld Gallery through January 10, 2027.

At the National Portrait Gallery, Issy Wood's Self-Portraits applies tightly cropped views and subtle distortions to the unstable work of depicting oneself. The paintings extend Wood's interest in consumer desire, intimacy, and concealment through February 28, 2027.

Performance at industrial scale

Slawn's Crane Painting, presented with Saatchi Yates on October 13, pushed live painting toward spectacle. Suspended from a crane at the Doon Street Car Park, the artist worked across a monumental canvas while the action unfolded in public. The finished surface retains that energy: repeated figures and marks overlap until the painting reads as both image and record of its own production.

Also open during the week are JW Anderson's A Composition, pairing work by Cerith Wyn Evans with ceramics, paintings, and sculpture in Pimlico, and Rirkrit Tiravanija's (situational awareness) at Pilar Corrias, which connects British military history with the labor traditions of Savile Row.

Read the original Hypebeast guide and visit the official Frieze London page for fair details.

Featured image courtesy of Slawn and Saatchi Yates. Inline images courtesy of Tate Modern and The Courtauld Gallery.