If you’re walking through the Frieze tent this week, watch your step when you get to Naama Tsabar’s booth, because its floor has been removed from the fair all together. The Israeli-born, Brooklyn-based artist requested that the floor be placed outside the tent, where it will act as a stage for a rotating list of bands comprised of 70 percent female musicians, to play an outdoor music festival for fairgoers. Tsabar’s Frieze Project, titled “Without,” comments on power dynamics that exist within the art fair structure, the economic burden placed on galleries renting booths, and gender imbalance across the arts.
“‘Without’ represents a reverse mirror to what’s going on inside the fair,” Tsabar said in a recent interview with ARTINFO. “The percentage of men, the booth without the floor, or the festival without the borders of the fair, and the fact that predominantly female musicians will play on this very expensive real estate cut out of the fair and put outside. The name translates to something that is there and not there.”
Co-curated by Mindy Abovitz, editor-in-chief of Tom Tom magazine (the only magazine in the world dedicated to female drummers), the festival line-up is an intentional mix of experienced and novice musicians, and includes bands from multiple genres. The point of this carefully curated program is to show that female musicians, like female artists, do not come in a single shape or size with identical musical interests, and that there are plenty of them — even though visibility is often still lacking.
To that point, Abovitz was the perfect collaborator on this project. “Part of the mission for Tom Tom magazine is to clearly state female drummers before everything we do,” she said. “It’s a very clear agenda of ours, almost with the intention to remove the emphasis by creating an emphasis.”
While other fairs spotlight female artists through special exhibitions, like the Armory Show’s “Venus Drawn Out: 20th Century Works by Great Women Artists” last March, Tsabar’s project asks what happens when all artistic presence, male and female, is removed from the fair booth — the minimalist gesture of the missing artists and gallerists from Tsabar’s dedicated space in the tent is big enough to notice. Repurposing the floor for a free music festival is also significant, as it allows the artists to claim a space that would have cost a gallery a steep price to reserve and makes music entirely accessible to the public.
“With the festival we’re hoping to create an environment that’s comfortable, where both women and men will be watching the music and enjoying all genres, and all skill levels,” said Abovitz. “There will be very little of that conscious discomfort that comes from going to a festival and only seeing men, or for that matter only seeing women —the same applies to going to galleries and museums. I hope this is something of an example, so that people can feel as free as possible.”
Click on the slideshow to see musicians performing in Naama Tsabar’s Frieze Project, “Without.”
