May 4: Frieze Frame

The British are coming—and not quietly. London’s Frieze Art Fair stages its first Stateside spectacle May 4 through 7 on Randall’s Island in New York’s East River. Frieze New York hosts some 180 international galleries under a large tentlike structure designed by architecture firm SO-IL, which will snake along a stretch of the island’s shore. “It’s a surreal place,” Cecilia Alemani, curator of the artist commissions for the fair’s Frieze Projects, says of the location. “Every time I’m there, it triggers associations with Treasure Island.” Alemani even invited novelist Rick Moody to pen a short story set on the island; and, in a nod to the site’s history as a locale for hospitals and asylums in the 19th century, Israeli artist Uri Aran will remake an abandoned office into a fictional examination room with doctors, patients, and strange “procedures” broadcast live—a piece of performance that is sure to be less Treasure Island than Shutter Island.

Ulla von Brandenburg’s Kulissen, 2011

Tim Rollins and K.O.S.’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (After Shakespeare and Mendelssohn), 2008.

Uri Aran’s A-Z (That Stops at Q), 2011

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (After Shakespeare And Mendelssohn): courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York; Kulissen: Photo Blaise Adilon, courtesy Art: Concept, Paris; A-Z (That Stops At Q): courtesy of Mother’s Tankstation; Diagram: courtesy of So-Il