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8/2/2005

ARCO'05

Parque Ferial Juan Carlos I, Madrid

Madrid's International Contemporary Art Fair

Galleries, artists, curators, collectors, mediators and agents from the international art circuit will all participate in the 24th International Contemporary Art Fair, to be held in Madrid from 10 – 14 February. This event, organised by IFEMA, annually brings together the best of the global art scene today through programming known for its quality, richness, and diversity. These three hallmarks of ARCO’s project have consolidated its international status, making it one of the most attractive art fairs in the world, and this edition will see yet another high-end selection of work, with fascinating programming by renowned international guest curators.

After 24 years of promoting and exploring new areas of artistic creation, ARCO today is a unique referent on the international scene. Its specialisation in the primary market; its guidelines stressing art from the second half of the 20th century, and the art of today; and its evolution towards seeking out new creative models and innovative exhibition venues—all of this and much more have positioned the show at the forefront of art fairs on the international scene.

The International Contemporary Art Fair will bring together 290 galleries from all over the world. The presence of established galleries side by side with emerging galleries with a marked international slant are proof of the show’s high standards, pushed even higher by the contribution of a top-flight team of international curators. Their wide-ranging proposals and content, going from a major retrospective on Mexican contemporary art to the latest forms of Russian realism, along with the contrast between emerging Latino art and a new generation of artists whose projects involved the latest technological media—all of this and more offers visitor a plural programme through which ARCO has created innovative spaces for exhibition and promotion, making the 2005 edition an ideal means for taking the pulse of today’s art market.

Among the major attractions of ARCO’05 will be the exceptional programming of its special guest country, Mexico. Another surprising new feature is the curated invitational THE BLACK BOX@ARCO, with an attractive selection of work showing new dimensions in media art, and the new generation of artists specialising in audiovisual and multimedia work. Another new sections will include ARCO Latino (for emerging Latino art), 2OSLO5 (new expressions from the Nordic scene), and PAINTING ONLY (a fresh look at painting as an emerging discourse).

Moreover, ARCO’s commitment to a multidisciplinary approach will take pride of place yet another year with its ephemeral architecture programme, featuring different actions and projects at the art fair itself and other spaces around Madrid, as well as the incorporation of contemporary dance, presented for the first time at Madrid’s 5th Contemporary Scene Festival.

Another novelty can be seen in ARCO’s Official Catalogue, which will be published on paper and a CD-ROM incorporating moving images, both to be available a month before the art fair with the aim of achieving a better, broader dissemination of the show’s artistic programming.

Artistic Programme

A total of 290 galleries from 35 countries—87 from Spain and 203 from abroad (or approximately 30% Spanish and 70% foreign)—will provide content for the official programme of the 24th International Contemporary Art Fair. This year’s selection offers a global vision of the world art, from five continents: Europe (213 galleries), North America (33), Latin America and the Caribbean (36), Asia (6), Africa (1), and Oceania (2). As to the countries represented at ARCO’05, a highlight is the German contingent, the largest at the event, followed by the USA, France, Portugal, and Italy. Other participating countries include Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Ireland and Switzerland, as well as such Eastern European countries as the Czech Republic, Estonia, Russia, and Slovenia. Asian galleries will be coming to Madrid from as far afield as Korea, Japan, and Thailand.

The core of ARCO’05 is its General Section, featuring 197 galleries selected by its Organising Committee, and four major Curated Invitationals: MEXICO AT ARCO'05, at which the fair’s special guest country will present 17 galleries from the nation’s principal art; PROJECT ROOMS, featuring 32 innovative pieces by the same number of artists; THE BLACK BOX@ARCO, with 16 galleries working in the field of new technologies, and lastly, NEW TERRITORIES, which will focus on emerging art and the search for new creative zones, as shown by 51international galleries, including the thematic emerging-art sections ARCO Latino, 2OSLO5 and PAINTING ONLY.

Mexico, the ARCO’05 Special Guest Country

Mexico’s presence as the special guest country will be one of the main attractions at ARCO’05. A total of 17 leading galleries were selected for MEXICO AT ARCO’05 by curators Carlos Ashida, director of Mexico City’s Carrillo Gil Art Museum, and Julian Zugazagoitia, director of the Museo del Barrio in New York. This show-within-a-show presents a historical retrospective of Mexican contemporary art, from its roots to the present day; a gamut of highly diverse work showing not only the most recent contemporary pieces, but also historic referents enabling visitors to better understand the evolution and cultural background of today’s Mexican artists.

Galleries considered essential in the recent history of Mexican art include GALERÍA DE ARTEMEXICANO, JUAN MARTÍN, and LÓPEZ QUIROGA, which will show some of the most important Mexican artists in the 20th century, such as Leonora Carrington, Alfredo Castañeda, Francisco Toledo, Vicente Rojo, and Gunther Gerzso. Moving forward in time, we find ARTE ACTUAL MEXICANO, PECANINS, OMR, and ENRIQUE GUERRERO; the most innovative art of today is represented by EMMA MOLINA, MYTO, ALTERNATIVA ONCE, and QUETZALLI, as well as experimental work from the galleries GARASH, ART&IDEA, KURIMANZUTTO, ESPACIO DE ARTE IVONAMOR PALIX y NINA MENOCAL/NMPROJECTS.

The programme MEXICO AT ARCO'05 has been supported by the most important Mexican cultural institutions—the National Council for Culture and the Arts (CONACULTA), National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA), Department of Foreign Relations, and the Mexican Embassy in Spain—and will also feature a series of events around Madrid. Participating institutions include the Reina Sofía National Art Centre, the Conde Duque Cultural Centre, La Casa Encendida, and the Canal de Isabel II: 15 in all, they will serve as venues for the exciting exhibitions programming that Mexico will be bringing to Madrid during ARCO’05.

PROJECT ROOMS

Now a clear referent for exploring new art proposals, the section PROJECT ROOMS enjoys another year as the space for experimentation par excellence, in which the artists themselves take the spotlight with site-specific projects, a provocative and innovative look at today’s art. The selection will include 32 pieces by as many artists from 11 European countries and the USA. Its curators, Peter Doroshenko and Eva Wittocx, director and senior curator respectively of the S.M.A.K. (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst) in Ghent, have tried to present the most wide-ranging, innovative look at the newest generation of artists today.

PROJECT ROOMS will include pieces from both emerging and established galleries, and artists from different generations marked by diverse artistic media and disciplines. From Germany, come the projects of Ernesto Caetano and Marcel Dzama; from Austria, Markus Schinwald and Meter Sandbichler; from Belgium—which has the largest continent—come the work of Pietro Roccasalva, Tina Gillen, Gundí-Rosa Ingmarsdottir, Philip Metten, Wim Delvoye, Wesley Meuris, and Dirk Braeckman; from Switzerland, Salla Thika and Reto Leibundgut; from the Netherlands, Suchan Kinoshita; from Slovenia, Sisley Xhafa; from Italy, Berlinde de Bruyckere; from Portugal, Rosângela Rennó and Francisco Queirós; from the UK, Marijke van Warmerdam and Christina Benz; and lastly, from the USA, Treton Doyle Hancock, Marcos Ramírez ‘Erre’, Zachary Wollard, and Aaron Parazette.

ARCO’s host country, Spain, will also be present, through the work of Juan Uslé, Kcho, Anthony Goicolea, Dora García, Jan Fabre, and Diango Hernández.

THE BLACK BOX@ARCO

The most important new exhibition area at the 24th International Contemporary Art Fair will be THE BLACK BOX@ARCO, specialised in audiovisual, multimedia, and Net art. This programme will focus as much on exploring new discourses and electronic media as on promoting the new generation of artists linked to these new technologies. Its curators—Agustín Pérez Rubio, Gerfried Stocker, Mark Tribe, Omar López Chahoud, Shamim M. Momin, and Anne Ellegood—include leading experts, theoreticians, and artists working in the field of new media and audiovisual creation. Their selection of 16 galleries includes a number of spaces specialised in video, computerised projections, installations with artificial intelligence mechanisms, 3D projects, Internet-based pieces, and other artworks incorporating new media. The pieces on display may present different levels of innovation but they all share an extremely high level of aesthetic and conceptual quality.

Agustín Pérez Rubio, curator-in-chief of the MUSAC, has selected five artists concentrating on audiovisual work: Jenny Perlin, Óscar Muñoz, Sung Hwan Kim, Jon Mikel Euba, Charles Sandison and Haluk Akakçe. For their part, the independent curators Omar López-Chahoud, Anne Ellegood, and Shamim M. Momin are presenting a joint curatorial project which aims to put the accent on the international media art scene, with installations created by Kutlug Ataman, Guy Richards Smit, John Pilson, Julian Rosefeldt, Shanon Plumb Tipy A, Tim Lee, Euan Macoonald, and Bjorn Melhus.

Lastly, Mark Tribe, director of Columbia University’s Art and Technology School of Arts, has selected an impressive interactive installation by Rafael Lozano–Hemmer, as well as a virtual videogame project by Mary Flanagan, and a piece by the collective Fakeshop. From Austria, Gerfried Stocker—director of Ars Electronica, the great annual festival held in Linz—has chosen the artists Yves Netzhammer and Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignommeau; moreover, the Mexican gallery Enrique Guerrero, a participant in other ARCO’05 programmes, will present an intervention by Yoshua Okon.

NEW TERRITORIES: Emerging art

For yet another year, this section is shaping up to be one of the most innovative at the art fair. Although its name has changed over the past few editions, in keeping with its rotating curators’ focus, its spirit remains the same: a space for exploring and disseminating the most innovative emerging art being produced today on the different international art scenes. This year, ARCO has a first-rate curatorial team whose selection, rather than centring on geographical criteria—as the section’s name would seem to imply—but rather, has focused on the search for the new creative zones being tackled by emerging art today.

NEW TERRITORIES at ARCO’05 was curated by 10 international experts and critics. Victor Zamudio-Taylor, an independent curator, researcher, and consult, presents a tour of New York, Mexico City, Paris, and Berlin. Víktor Misiano, director of Moscow Art Magazine, introduces emerging art from the former Soviet Union. Angela Vettese, an art consultant from Italy, has sought some of the most experimental spaces, highlighting those that support emerging international art. Eduardo Costantini, executive director of the Buenos Aires Museum of Latin American Art, will present emerging art from Argentina. The most innovative work on the Canadian scene comes from David Liss, director of the MOCCA, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, through his wide-ranging selection of galleries from Toronto, Ontario, and Montreal. Enrique Juncosa, director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, will show the variety of young Irish art, to which the four galleries in his selection are firmly committed. The new aesthetics of Asia are to be shown through three different lenses at ARCO’05: those of Mami Kataoka, a conservator from the Mori Art Museum for Japan, focusing on Japan; Josette Balsa, an art critic and guest curator at Hong Kong University Museum, looking at China and Thailand; and Sun Jung Kim, curator of the Sonje Museum of Contemporary Art, Kyongju, Korea. This tour of new zones of creation could not pass over the presence of the latest African art, presented once again by Simon Njami, an independent art critic and curator.

ARCO Latino, 2OSLO5 and Painting Only

Also within the scope of emerging art, ARCO’05 presents three other sections to round out NEW TERRITORIES and its international search new creative areas and new names on the least conventional art circuits.

ARCO Latino —according to its curator, Antonio Zaya, director of the Atlantic Centre for Modern Art in the Canary Islands—creates a dialogue between the classic segments of contemporary art and the more dynamic elements in Latin America. The selection includes a variety of media, but the accent is on painting, due to its weight and relevance on the American market. Zaya’s intent is to try to establish a balance between the continental and the insular, between the magnitude of such mega-states as Brazil or Mexico, and the token presence of the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, which also feature rich artistic production. This section features the galleries VARELLI-ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO, from the Dominican Republic; WALTER OTERO, from Puerto Rico; Cuba’s LOS OFICIOS; the Chilean ARTESPACIO; TERRENO BALDÍO, from Mexico; and the Brazilian MG MARCI GAYMU.

2OSLO5, a section curated by Sune Nordgren, director of the Nasjonalmuseet for Kunst in Oslo, proposes a look at emerging art from the Nordic countries. His title, 2OSLO5, which plays with the name of the Norwegian capital and the number for next year, alludes to the commemoration of a key date in the history of his country: 1905, when it gained independence from Sweden. As part of the centennial celebrations, 2OSLO5 will feature a series of Oslo-based galleries, GALLERI BRANDSTRUP, GALLERI K, GALLERI RIIS, GALLERÍ WANG, and MGM.

For his part, Brian Müller, director de Contemporary Magazine, in his curated invitational PAINTING ONLY, has concentrated on four London galleries which not only share the objective of promoting emerging creators, but are also all specialised in painting: ROVE, HOULDSWORTH GALLERY, PROGRAM, and DOMOBAAL

Ephemeral Architecture at ARCO

As usual, architecture will have a high profile at this year’s ARCO, through different actions during the art fair. The spatial project developed for the layout of ARCO’05 by the TABLE architecture studio is experimental, exploring usages and forms, and incorporating new elements and interventions such as The Black Box@Arco, the Experimental Space in the nexus between Halls 5 and 7, and, outdoors, the Casa México pavilion, as well as Project AVIÓN (carried out by Equipo TEN-T and Eduardo Cajal).

Other interventions are the chill-outs, ephemeral architecture sponsored by Spain’s Ministry of Housing, and co-ordinated by Pablo Berzal and David Pastor as part of the Arch Lab project, carried out by students from the architecture schools of the universities of Mexico City and Navarre. The winning student projects are Inutero, the Mexican chill-out, designed by Héctor Luis Hernández Carrillo and Villamar Téllez Neyra, and Esfera, created by the Navarran students Pablo Ausucua García, Iñaki Esteban Valencia, and Josefa Garraza Álvarez.

Arte and Dance: Interventions by Pé Vermeersch and Marc Rees

ARCO’s integrating spirit has expanded this year to encompass a new artistic discipline: contemporary dance. Two interventions, which form part of the official programme of the 5th Contemporary Scene Festival, organised by the Madrid Region, will be brought to ARCO by two prestigious artists. The experimental Belgian choreographer Pé Vermeersch will perform the Spanish premiere of Blondes Have No Soul, a radical piece to be presented as an art project within the fair. The second intervention will feature Marc Rees, a major exponent of contemporary dance from Wales, who will present Shed*Light, a performance to be carried out inside Project Avión, and which will highlight the nature of this architectural construction as a space for social interaction and desire.

Open Madrid International Public Art Programme

In parallel to ARCO'05 the second edition of OPEN MADRID will be carried out. This international public art programme is supported by the Altadis Foundation, the Madrid Region’s Council for Cultre and Sports, and the City of Madrid’s Arts Council, with the collaboration of ARCO’05, the Spanish National Television series Metrópolis, Madrid’s Círculo de Bellas Artes, and Casa de América.

To mark Mexico at ARCO’05, two Mexican projects will be included in the selection to be presented at the upcoming edition of Open Madrid: interventions by José Dávila , Mirador Nómada (Nomadic View) for the façade of Casa de América; and by the collective Tercerunquinto, (Julio Castro, Gabriel Cázares, and Rolando Flores) Conexión de Jardineras (Garden Connection), to be carried out along the nearby Paseo de Recoletos. Both projects were selected by Carlos Ashida, curator of MEXICO AT ARCO’05.

Project Salas, Institutional Collections

PROJECT SALAS will, as it does every year, bring together a group of institutional and corporate collections. At ARCO’05, its participants, all promoters of collecting, include the City of Madrid’s Arts Council, the City of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Caja Madrid Savings Bank, the Madrid Region’s Council for Culture, the Province of Malaga, Telefónica Foundation, the Valencia Region’s Valencian Institute of Modern Art (IVAM), the Cantabria Region’s Culture Council, the Extremaduran and Ibero-American Museum of Contemporary Art (MEIAC), Spain’s Ministry of Culture, the Unión Fenosa Contemporary Art Museum, Sala de Exposiciones Rekalde, Art in Norland, and Afinsa.

International Experts Forum

Parallel to the art fair, for the third year in a row, ARCO will be organising a top-flight international encounter, with representatives from every facet of the art market. Collectors, curators, and directors from some of the world’s principal museums and art centres, together with opinion leaders and exhibitions policy-makers from more than 30 countries will participate in the International Contemporary Art Experts Forum, a unique event which has already consolidated a reputation as one of the major international professional events, and as a prestigious showcase for debate and reflection on the art object and its distribution.

This edition of the Forum will feature 15 series of panel debates, with a total of 189 participants, dealing with such current issues as Art and Art Criticism, Art Biennials, Collecting and the Contemporary Artistic Legacy, Curating for Today’s Museums and Art Spaces, Publishing Today, Feminism, Art and Societies, Film and Video, Experimental Publishing Projects, and Photography, as well as other topics providing a theoretical context for the curated invitationals, such as Mexico: Tradition and Avant-Garde, New Media Art II, Experimental Communities, and a wide-ranging programme of conferences by the ARCO’05 curating team.

The ARCO 05 Catalogue

Published by Ediciones del Umbral, the ARCO'05 Catalogue’s nearly 1000 pages will offer a tour of the art fair, with information on every one of its participating galleries, institutions, and artists, as well as approximately 1000 images featuring the most important work to be shown. The catalogue’s design, as well as the ARCO’05 graphics, is by BELIO. The Catalogue will also be available on a CD-ROM by Silicom Artists and Ediciones El Umbral. Both versions will be on sale a month before ARCO’05 in specialised bookstores and other major Spanish outlets, in order to support the promotion of this new edition of ARCO.

DURING THE FAIR
III International Contemporary Art Experts Forum. ARCO'05 FORUM
With a programme devised by leading Artists, Critics, Collectors and Directors, Gallerists, Museum and Art Centre Curators, discussing issues affecting art at this current moment in time:
* Art and Art Criticism
* Art and New Technologies
* Biennials
* Cities in transition
* The Art of Collecting Art. Collecting and Contemporary Artistic Heritage
* Curating for Today's Museums and Art Spaces
* Publishing Today
* Emerging Artists and Curators
* Feminism, Art and Societies
* Film & Video
* México tradition and avant-garde
* New professional relationships in art (Eseté)
* Expanded territory: Photography in Artistic Field
* Curatorial Projects

Major Collectors at ARCO
A special social programme designed for eminent contemporary art collectors invited to the fair

ARCO Foundation
The foundation will purchase works at ARCO’05 to add to its collection.

Photographic Glimpses. Amigos de ARCO Association Photography Collection
A group of interesting photographers will offer their own personal visions of ARCO’05. These photographs will than form part of this collection.

Social Programme
Madrid Art in February offers a host of openings and social acts to exhibitors, collectors and speakers at the Experts Forum.

Official Opening: (by invitation) Wednesday, February 9, 7 p.m.
*access to the halls will be allowed from 5 p.m.
Professional Visit: (by invitation) Wednesday February, 9 from 11 a.m to 9:30 p.m. and Thursday February 10, from 11 a.m to 5 p.m.
Open to the General Public: Thursday February 10, from 5 p.m to 9 p.m. Première. Friday 11, Saturday 12, Sunday 13, and Monday 14 February from 12 a.m. to 9 p.m.

ARCO Communications and Press Office
Marta Cacho, ARCO Press Secretary
Tel: +34 91 722 50 94
e-mail: mcacho@ifema.es

Parque Ferial Juan Carlos I - Halls: 7 and 9
28042 Madrid
ESPAÑA

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