Lisson Gallery's booth at this year's Frieze London presents new and recent work by international art world heavyweights. A stainless steel sculpture by Anish Kapoor, coated with red lacquer, dominates the booth’s entrance at B6. This highly polished, monumental work, measuring nearly 4 metres high, creates fleeting and fluid reflections of art fair goers. At the back of the booth, a custom-built viewing room has been designed to showcase two works by artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah: Tropikos (2016), which was commissioned by the UK’s Arts Council Collection in celebration of its 70th anniversary, and Peripeteia (2012), a single channel meditation on African diaspora and disappearances.

Pedro Reyes, whose project Doomocracy with Creative Time is haunting New Yorkers in the run up to Halloween and the November presidential election, presents a new black sundial made of volcanic stone and brass in the form of a hand and needle. The needle’s shadow tells the time as the sun slowly moves across the sculpture’s surface, making the work complete only when permanently installed in sunlight. A black-and-white still from Santiago Sierra’s film Person paid to have a 30 cm line tattooed on them, Regina Street # 51, Mexico City, May 1998 (1998), in which a drug addict was tattooed in exchange for money, confronts the issue of worker exploitation in the context of global capitalism. A number of works by Ai Weiwei will also be on display, including his hand-painted porcelain map of China, Free Speech Puzzle (2015), which has been modelled on traditional pendants depicting a family’s name and their status. On this map, however, the names have been replaced with the words ‘free speech’ in both English and Chinese, starkly illustrating the use of state censorship for political purposes in China. Exposure of state and military actions are further evidenced in Allora & Calzadilla’s Contract (SWMU 14) (2015), a large silkscreen on linen, that at first glance depicts a conventional picture of a tropical destination yet actually catalogues sites in Puerto Rico where the US Military has planted palm trees demarcating areas of hazardous waste deposited over the course of their 60-year occupation of the island.

The fair marks the debut of the latest reiteration of Edgar Degas’s ballerina by Ryan Gander. Like Degas, Gander’s ballerina has been found in a myriad of positions, reaching over a plinth on her tiptoes or sitting on the floor with her back to the same sculptural base smoking a cigarette. At Frieze London, she is posed leaning upright against the wall as if peering at the edge of a wall-based work. Appropriating not from an art historical context but cyberspace, recent digital paintings by Cory Arcangel use images he has downloaded or scanned over the past 15 years, intentionally presented in both high and low resolutions. The works’ reflect the artist’s multifarious and transient interests, as well as his ability to leverage cultural value from the Internet.

Other works on the stand include a recent work by Richard Long, featuring the artist’s fingerprints drawn with mud on driftwood; a new painting by Shirazeh Houshiary, replete with formal details, hand-mixed pigments and a richly layered composition that alludes to the topographical or cosmological effects that have come to characterise her paintings over the past 10 years; and a 1984 automatic writing painting by Susan Hiller, which details her on-going investigations into telepathy and the unconscious transmission of ideas.