28/5/2008
ArteBa 08
La Rural, Buenos Aires
In the international context, arteBA is undoubtedly a leading referent for the Latin American art market and with 16 successful editions to its credit, it is the top visual arts event in the country. It has consolidated itself as the epicenter of Latin American art: during five intense days, the Fair is a focal point for business and meetings as well as a major tourism attraction, visited by distinguished figures and personalities from the world of culture.
In the international context, arteBA is undoubtedly a leading referent for the Latin American art market and with 16 successful editions to its credit, it is the top visual arts event in the country.
arteBA has consolidated itself as the epicenter of Latin American art: during five intense days, the Fair is a focal point for business and meetings as well as a major tourism attraction, visited by distinguished figures and personalities from the world of culture. Year after year, over 110,000 people visit the Fair and have the opportunity to appreciate an outstanding collection of contemporary art presented by the best art galleries in the region.
CAJA NEGRA / CUBO BLANCO (BLACK BOX / WHITE CUBE)
DIGITAL CUBES AND VIRTUAL SCREENS
Curators: Fabiana Barreda and Tobías Ostrander
For this new edition, different aesthetics will find its place in each projection space. Virtual bodies, action, video performances, animations, video-games, opera and different digital genres will be present.
The amount of material received, the quality plus the important participation of Tobías Ostrender, curator of video at Museo Rufino Tamayo, have facilitated the expansion for the 08 edition of the video are in terms of production and geopolitics, since videos from Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Chile and Canada will be projected.
In this sense, we will be witnesses to a new and interesting production of video-art, which due to the constant support of Converse as sponsor will have its place accompanying artists belonging to the avant garde of digital art.
Converse, sponsor of video area, celebrates a century of originality. Since the creation of All Star® sneakers in 1908, the Afro-American rural equipments of the 1920 and 1930 decades; members of NBA, rock and roll and today´s pop culture, all these people that have altered the status quo and that have imprinted a change in history have used Converse. Today the company is celebrating its centennial by supporting art at its highest expression: an installation created by Architect Guillermo Lerner, who will interpret this celebration in a space with applied graphic art and a “stairway” with overlapped modules made of leds, in a completely unconventional way.
Box 1
Animal Gallery (Chile) will present two videos: Lucía by Cristóbal León, Joaquín Cociña and Miles Atallah , through an aesthetics of animation of the unreal resuscitates the ghost of a little girl. Mystery and terror have their peak in the beauty of the intervened drawings at the little girl’s room and the disturbing soundtrack. Among this new artistic generation it is interesting to see the appropriation of genders like terror, as in Blair Wicht and The Call or Amenabar´s and Chalayan´s movies. The film narrative and its marginal genders are appropriated and amplified by video-art while creating a new oniric and ritual atmosphere. Yael Rosenblut´s work El Beso, amor sublime (The kiss, sublime love) shows a theatrical action. It evokes a narration of a baroque and delicate fiction, similar to Velazquez´s Las Meninas, from a foucaultian point of view and analysis of the pictorial reconstruction.
Marina de Caro´s work, 4 ojos dependiendo de tu humor (4 eyes, depending on your humor) (Ruth Benzacar Gallery, Argentina) develops her personal imaginary through urban video performances, where a creature of a playful spirit is born as in the French movie Red Balloon. There are also quotations of the atmosphere found in Jacques Tati´s films. The creature as an extension of a corporeal packing creates a poetic that joins the vulnerable and the absurd. The animation of the unreal, the body as a ghost or automaton and the fetichization of garments connect the different works exhibited in this space.
Box 2
Sebastiano Mauri`s work, I Believe in God (Braga Menéndez, Argentina) narrates
a hypnotic sequence of religious icons that belong to different cultural creeds marvellously selected for an universal pantheon. Jorge Mena Barreto, in his work Lugares Moles (Bolsa de Arte, Brazil) narrates a methodic animation of small scenes about catastrophes through the melting of the organic surfaces where his characters stand. The shared aesthetics by these artists is the animation of puppets-icons and their context, creating a new perception in the animation from an object-fetiche or toy-real and its possible sociological interpretations.
Box 3
Gabriel Valansi´s Abstract-dos arias de amor (Abstract-two love arias) (Sicart Gallery, Spain) is a molecular view of the origin of digital image. Researching from an existential point of view on the extremes Eros-Tanatos, images intertwine through different appropriations of codified means of visual representation: ecography, explosion views and attack objectives, among others. This historical sequence becomes an epic narration of a life, culminating in classic love arias until it disintegrates again in the abstraction of the beginning: the original pixel of the image. Estanislao Florido´s work, Supermarket-Chinese Games (713, Argentina), critically appropriates of videogames´ aesthetics generating a political reading of Argentinean socio-economical context. Through humor, the last economical, class and ethnic confrontations of Buenos Aires during 2001 are narrated. These artists share a media and digital aesthetics and the possible forms of reflection on the subject of virtual death.
Box 4: Video-Home
This space will present a selection of works that reflect on the domestic space.
Leonello Zambon´s, Apocalipsis modesto (Humble Apocalypsis) (1/1 Caja de Arte, Argentina) builds a series of psychological images as an intimate nightmare about the territory of the house.
Body-House, interior and exterior melt together recreating a theory of representation inside representation. In a powerful darkness, with dark colors or black and white, these images remind us works by Bill Viola and Carl Dreyer.
In a different and more Proustian direction the work Lo que el viento se llevo, dispositivo para espacio de contemplación (Gone by the wind gadget for contemplation space) by Fernando Goin appears. This video is about memories and the possibility of perception of everyday spaces as a possible projection of memory as a state of contemplation of the past.
Lila SIegrist´s work Silenciosos (The silent ones) (Daniel Abate, Argentina) with a pop and feminine point of view animates different tablecloths of a house with images that bring us back to childhood, like those of Wizard of Oz, images of fear and happiness on different events of the houses and tornadoes.
FOREIGN GALLERIES - 5 BOXES
Box 5
Through Graciela Taquini´s work, Lo sublime / Banal (The Sublime/ The Trivial) (Galerie Lilian Rodríguez, Canada) gender narratives are updated, where the domestic milieu and the story of two women are developed creating an atmosphere of intimacy and psychological understanding.
Box 6
The theatrical and oniric atmosphere is highlighted in the work of Eduardo Sourrouille: If you could see him through my eyes (Del Sol St., Spain). Mysterious and intriguing is the narrative atmosphere that is revealed at the end of the scene. Its climate evokes works by Argentine director, Eduardo Basualdo, who belongs to the Provisorio Permanente group.
Box 7
Fact Fiction by Mauricio Alejo (OMR, Mexico) refers us to video as action, and it can be linked to the Infraleve effect by Duchamp in Gabriel Orozco´s work, Aliento sobre el piano (Breath over the piano), both generating a new idea on the perception of a work.
Sinapsis-Pista de Baile (Synapse-Dancehall) by Gabriel Acevedo Velarde (OMR, Mexico) takes us to molecular domestic neo-animations whose passion for drawing joins by means of images and narration digital and analogical systems.
Box 8
Rodrigo Sastre´s work Starwar (La Refaccionaria, Mexico) shows a vintage animation: the rescue of a universe that belongs to childhood and adolescence where the sensitive writing is the biographical means that emotionally strengthens the art work.
Box 9
Joaquín Segura`s work, Annihilation (Arena, Mexico), is a conceptual reflection on the social status of words. In harmony with Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruguer, text, calligraphy, and idea visually intertwine.
Fernando Palomar`s work, Haffner Finale (Arena, Mexico) proposes a romantic grunge action. Half way between Friederich and Nirvana, a musician against the light in front of a crepuscular sky –a sublime sunset- reinterprets an orchestral classical concert with drums.
Fabiana Barreda, 2008
arteBA`08 Auditorium Program will take place at prime time hour, 6pm, and will host prestigious special guests.
Three round tables will be coordinated by Cuauhtémoc Medina (associate curator, Latin-American Art, Tate Modern, GB) while the fourth round table will be coordinated by Rosa Olivares (Director, Exit, Imagen y cultura, Madrid).
Cuauhtémoc Medina
Global Art/ Latin-American Art: New Strategies
“These round tables aim to bear witness to a complex network of institutional displacements that cross along Latin-American Art. In the first place, the new role that the sub-continent has acquired regarding policies of metropolitan museums –which consider the region as one of their priorities- will be debated. In the second place, we aim to testify the resurgence of public collectionism by Latin-American museums, due in part to the intensification of global interactions. Finally, we will explore the emergence of a new kind of independent institution that uses oral transmission as a means to create a new public sphere”.
Rosa Olivares
“In these last years, Latin-American Art has started to be seen, pretty often, in the most influential art venues in Europe; nevertheless, there is no regulation regarding the art market, public collections and even less private collections.
The question is if Latin-American art still belongs to the ever changing and ambiguous terrain of the exotic, if it has become a trend and therefore, something of an ephemeral appreciation or on the contrary, if there is a slow increase of interest and respect towards what happens in the field of visual arts in Latin America. In Europe,
the difficulties regarding the understanding of the situation of each and every country that belong to the hazy term `Latin-America´ are solved by accepting icons, concrete persons, isolated names: Gabriel Orozco, Guillermo Kuitca, Doris Salcedo, but the lack of knowledge concerning the real situation of visual arts is the prevailing trend. In this round table, we will try to analyze the present situation and immediate future perspectives”.
Thursday, May 29, 6 pm:
Altering narratives: the inclusion of Latin-America in the program of Contemporary Art museums.
Coordinator: Cuauhtémoc Medina
Speakers: Tanya Barson [Internacional Art curator, Tate Modern, London, England]; Luis E. Pérez Oramas [Estrellita Brodsky curator of Latin-American Art, MoMA, New York, USA]; Lynn Zelevansky [curator and Chair of Contemporary Art Department, LACMA, Los Angeles, USA].
Friday, May 30, 6 pm:
Reactivating the local canon: new collectionism of public museums in Latin-America
Coordinator: Cuauhtémoc Medina
Speakers: Presentation of Olivier Debroise [curator of the UNAM Universidad Autónoma de Mexico, Mexico DF, Mexico] readed by Cuauhtémoc Medina; Marcelo Araujo [Director, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil]; Inés Katzenstein [Director, Art Department, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires].
Saturday, May 31, 6pm:
Towards the Exhibition Halls of 21 century: beyond the exhibition hall
Coordinator: Inés Katzenstein
Speakers: Adam Lerner [Executive Director, The Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar, Denver, USA]; Ruth Sibaja [Executive Director, Teorética, San Jose, Costa Rica]; Rodrigo Quijano [Curator, La Culpable member, Lima, Peru]; Oscar Muñoz [Director, Lugar a dudas, Cali, Colombia].
Sunday, June 1, 6 pm:
Visivbility of Latin-American Art in Europe
Coordinator: Rosa Olivares
Speakers: Osvaldo Sánchez [Director, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico DF, Mexico]; Marta Gili [Directora, Jeu de Paume Musée , Paris, France]; Hans-Michael Herzog [Director and Curator, Daros-Latinamérica, Zurich, Swiss].
Press Contact
Tel (5411) 4816-8704 | Fax (5411) 4816-8709 | prensa@arteba.org
Press chief Maia Güemes
La Rural, fair pavilions of Buenos Aires,
Blue and green pavilions, Av. Sarmiento 2704
Every day from 1 pm to 10 pm