Frieze London 2022: Nikita Gale’s artwork ’63/22′ explores the politics of sight and sound

LA-based multidisciplinary artist Nikita Gale at Frieze London 2022

Five custom-made electric guitars are mounted on the makeshift wall at at Frieze London. These intricate objects form part of a larger artwork called ’63/22′ by LA-based multidisciplinary artist Nikita Gale. Each guitar is named after significant Black female guitarists of history: Memphis Minnie, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Barbara Lynn, Big Mama Thornton and Joan Armatrading. Every few minutes a spotlights directs our gaze from one guitar to the next. Later in the day, three musicians will activate the guitars through live ten-to-fifteen-minute performances.

This is what happens when seemingly disparate industries overlap – when ideas collide. ’63/22′ is an artwork loaded with meaning. It takes on the current discourse surrounding the politics of sight and sound, what we are guided to see, and what we are told to hear, and of invisible voices. Through the medium of design and sound, Gale is asking us to review our biases, question what has come before, and make change happen.

’63/22′ is directed by Gale in collaboration with a team of car designers and the luthier Ian Malone for BMW Open Work by Frieze. The initiative itself aims to bring together art, design and technology, and to show this in a setting outside of the auto world.

The 63 in the title refers to the year 1963, when Gibson Guitar commissioned a car designer by the name of Ray Dietrich, who had pioneered the concept of the custom-built car designer in the age of classic cars. The idea was to bring in a creative voice from outside the traditional music world who would investigate the possibilities of the electric guitar in shape and feel.

Conventions were broken with Dietrich’s asymmetrically shaped Firebird sporting a taller horn positioned on the right rather than the customary left. The wooden neck had nine strips of alternating mahogany and maple, layered for strength and stability, spanning the full length of the instrument. It featured some wonderful quirky details too, with the wings thought to resemble the car’s tail fins. Naturally, the Firebird sounded different to other electric guitar of the time.

One of five custom-made electric guitars for ’63/22′ by Nikita Gale

I meet Nikita Gale at Frieze London to untangle the complex artwork, ’63/22′.

Why an interest in the politics of sound?

My mum was a music teacher, and music was always happening in our house. Alongside teaching me the piano, she would speak about historically significant musicians. Growing up on an air force base in Alaska, she was often a visiting music teacher to our school, giving lessons on Black music history and so on. For me, it wasn’t only about enjoying the music but thinking about the histories that preceded it.

Your project at Frieze continues the investigation into the politics of sound but through the lens of the car. How did this connection happen?

At grad school, I began thinking about cars not just as technologies but as objects that we project cultural and political information into, in that the modes and the means of production of these technologies are not neutral. Decisions are being made that are informed by political positions: are the cars powered by fossil fuel versus electric, or the designs and shapes they take? What cars look like is largely determined by the understanding and biases of the people designing them.

Most of whom would be of a certain gender. How did you then circle this back to music?

While investigating cars, I began encountering interesting information about music, particularly American blues and rock. Early blues and rock songs were largely about cars, such as Ike Turner’s 1951 ‘Rocket 88’ – considered the first rock and roll record. Cars are metaphors for personal freedom, sexuality, and gender expression. The overlaps kept happening during my research, which is when I came upon Ray Dietrich and his work with Gibson in 1963. It is the first time these two industries overlapped on such a large, mass-produced scale.

It must have seemed quite a surprise then to be approached by BMW for the Frieze project. Speaking with the curator Attilia Fattori Franchini earlier, she was unaware you were already thinking along these streams of ideas.

Crazy, right? I had this idea in my back pocket for seven years, so when BMW reached out to collaborate at Frieze, I already knew what I wanted to do. It was an incredible coincidence, and I knew we had to do this. Added to this, I’m a real car fan.

And how do you feel about the project that is displayed before us?

It never ceases to amaze seeing an object born out of a concept that exists in space. This project has truly taken this to a new level. These guitars are not just aesthetic art objects but functional technology; they are all playable guitars that Ian Malone helped make possible.

The guitar you’ve designed have clearly questioned the conventional shape of the instrument, its masculinity.

Yes, absolutely. During the design process, I discussed the profile of the types of users of these technologies with the BMW designers. We looked at who would be playing the guitars and how we should be designing with other bodies in mind other than the typical type who were determining the shape of things in the 60s, which would have been primarily white men. The musician St. Vincent recently designed a signature guitar that has a much narrower body to accommodate people with breasts. I asked our designers to consider ergonomics with all body shapes in mind.

Can you explain the performative side when these aesthetic objects neatly lining the wall are played?

We’ve invited three diverse musicians to perform at 3 pm each day, giving them carte blanche to do what they want and choose the guitar they like. It’s been fascinating to see which ones they go for. Luckily no two have gone for the same guitar.

’63/22′ interrogates the politics of sight and sound, what we are directed to see and allowed to hear, and how this manifests itself in invisible voices. What were you hoping to achieve with the project?

I strongly believe in the importance of modelling possibilities. So, when I think about this moment in 1963, where these industries overlap, I look at this as a demonstration of what is possible when conversations are allowed to overlap in a very direct way. I’m looking at the moment when ideas collide.

Given that general guitar design hasn’t changed so much in the last 60 years, by recreating and almost staging the scene in this context, we can shine a light on the possibilities of change.

The shapes and forms of technologies were largely determined by the biases of people designing them. As political and cultural landscapes change, those biases also shift. Where are we now? Why are we sticking to what came before? We can still change things. Nothing is set in stone. In the essay Technology and Ethos, Amiri Baraka, writing as LeRoi Jones at the time, has a great line: Nothing has to look or sound the way that it does.

The 19th edition of Frieze London takes place from October 12-16, 2022. 

Images © Nikita Gale/BMW

Enter the fascinating universe of Joan Jonas

Yesterday I found myself immersed in the work of Joan Jonas, lost in thought in the vast, subterranean Tate Modern Tanks and then in Herzog & de Meuron’s twisting, spiralling Switch House. Walking through her life’s work, I felt compelled to enter her imaginary, real, brilliant, often bizarre and always colourful worlds. Then downstairs in the Tanks, we were treated to a special preview of Mirror Piece II, a long-admired performance from 1970. Live art feels so intimate, and this was pure visceral joy.

Jonas is a pioneer in the world of performance and the visual arts, and this is the most comprehensive and captivating exhibition of her work ever shown in the UK. Unfolding over ten days and six nights, BMW Tate Live showcases Jonas’s performances and installations including ground-breaking works not staged for 40 years.

The artist produced a vast and complex body of work to include film stills, sketches, video installations and live performances, and it has been a challenge for the curators here to find new ways to share the way Jonas uses live theatre situations to explore storytelling, conveying her movement back and forth in time, how she constantly remakes and rearranges existing situations.

Jonas creates miniature performance theatres – at once a balance of the instance and preserving the past, keeping memories, re-imagining past textures, re-thinking ideologies. These are action sculpture and her work is always alive – the past and present in constant dialogue.

‘I always thought the activity of putting one object next to another was like making a visual poem,’ writes Jonas about the props she has displayed as a sculpture in the opening room. Her work draws from curious cultures and religions, from imagery, fairy tales. Jonas has long been fascinated by oral storytelling, and you sense this walking around and into her giant-size moving screens.

In the late 1960s and 70s, she shot stills in New York, capturing the textures and the colours of a city on the edge of bankruptcy. Later she began working more directly with narrative exploring women’s place in history, ‘as outsiders, witches, storytellers,’ she says. ‘I’ve always been interested in the poetics of how women are depicted, which is political, of course.’

Jonas’s work is presented at the Tate in dialogue with an intergenerational selection of artists – Jason Moran, Mark Leckey, Sylvia Palacios Whitman, Jumana Emil Abboud – demonstrating the powerful impact she has had on contemporary artists today. Throughout these ten days, visitors are invited to explore a series of installations in the Tanks to include her acclaimed Reanimation, a spellbinding environment made from projected footage of Arctic landscapes and light refracted through dozens of hanging crystals.

What makes the Tate Live series so special are the six-night live performance programmes. They will open with Jonas performing live with her long-time collaborator, the jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran. The third and fourth nights will be dedicated to three seminal performances from a formative period in Jonas’s career: Mirror Check, Mirror Piece II and Mirage, the latter performed by Jonas herself for the first time since 1980. The final weekend will focus on Chilean-American artist Sylvia Palacios Whitman, a peer of Jonas who also came to prominence in New York in the 1970s, performing for the first time in the UK and will debut a new collaboration with photographer Christopher Rauschenberg, son of artist Robert Rauschenberg which, in the spirit of the avant-garde, will be kept a surprise.

Nargess Banks

BMW Tate Live: Ten Days Six Nights (16 – 25 March 2018) is curated by Catherine Wood, senior curator of international art (performance), Isabella Maidment, assistant curator of performance and Andrea Lissoni, senior curator of international art (film).

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