Frieze has announced its 2017 Frieze Film commissions, revealing that Alex Bag, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, and Raphaela Vogel will create new works as part of the non-profit Frieze Projects program, curated by Raphael Gygax.

This year’s Frieze Film explores themes of surrealism, popular myth, and the carnivalesque. Each film will premiere in the Frieze London auditorium during the fair, which runs from October 5 – 8, and will later show as part of Random Acts, the UK’s Channel 4’s short-form strand dedicated to the arts.

Icelandic artist Gabríela Friðriksdóttir is particularly well known for the surreal scenarios with their hybrid and sexually charged beings that characterize her films, which take themes of Icelandic occultism, Norse mythology, and the traditions of experimental-film as points of departure.

Gabríela Frídriksdóttir (b. 1971) lives and works in Reykjavík. She graduated from the Icelandic College of Art and Crafts in 1997, and in a short time she has come to be a prominent figure within the contemporary Icelandic art scene. Working in various media—sculpture, drawing, painting, sound sculpture and music—her work is strongly characterized by what has come to be called the “sweetness of horror.” Gabríela examines the chaos and excesses of society while playing on the borders of dreams and reality, drawing from a fantastic mythology of her own creation. In 2005 Gabríela was Iceland’s representative at the Venice Biennale. www.gabriela.is