Friend/free (to love)

In English, ‘friend’ and ‘free’ share the same root: frēon, meaning ‘to love.’ This shared etymology is expressed in friendship as an open and ongoing encounter that is inherently anarchic and exists outside of property relations: friendship is an affinity not tethered to bloodlines or sexual affiliations. It is a way of being free from the logics of possession, a framework for sharing, extending, co-constituting.

‘Friend/free (to love)’ brings together eight artistic comrades to ask: how do works created by friends speak to one another? Can friendship trouble the connection between art and property? Can friends redefine and renegotiate conventions of aesthetic autonomy through the process of reciprocal creative labour? 

To think about friendship as a framework for analysis is to make a demand towards the future: it is to enunciate the desirable conditions that friendship produces and how these conditions can activate the cracks in the established order. What is it about friendship that can free us, and why are both words acts of love?

‘Friend / free (to love)’ is curated by Alice McCool and Ena Grozdanić. It features the work of Yusuf Ali Hayat and Dominic Guerrera, Astrid Lorange and Andrew Brooks (Snack Syndicate), Sanja Grozdanić and Jelena Luise, and Hen Vaughan and Georgia Oatley.

Images credit: Installation view. ‘Friend/free (to love)’, exhibition at Bus Projects, 2025. Photography by Sebastian Kainey.

This exhibition is supported by the Independent Arts Foundation.