Continuity and Change
Maia Guemes
A Selection Committee picks out the best proposals from national and foreign art galleries and in this way visitors are granted a unique opportunity to compare and purchase art pieces from the most outstanding offering of regional and local contemporary art. For the great majority of those galleries, the fair means good profit: some exhibit works by consecrated artists; many show works coming from authors who have a well-known career and are publicly acknowledged; some others present young artists whose work raises much interest.
The art fair then becomes a business center for Latin American art. Great collectors and culture representatives are present in this fair, which fosters meeting these personalities and interacting with them as well as it leading to the expansion of the art market.
arteBA Fair is a unique platform for exhibition and an excellent opportunity to visit Buenos Aires during one of its most exciting weeks, thus combining special exhibitions, parties and parallel events. arteBA Contemporary Art Fair has turned into a pole of attraction for local and foreign collectors, and as a cultural event is now a must in the international calendar.
The Fair is visited by foreign and local collectors that have the chance to privately view arteBA, visiting public and private collections, artists´ studios and contemporary art galleries. Also to be presented is the arteBA-Petrobras Award for the Visual Arts Third Edition, a prize that has become one of the most expected and controversial in the local scenario. Meant for artistic projects made on a grant and then exhibited in the Fair, the arteBA-Petrobras Award for the Visual Arts generates much debate in the area of the Fair as well as in the media.
Due to the success of the first editions of the arteBA, second editions are going to be held with the participation of international and local museums such as the Museo del Barrio of NYC, the Jack S Blanton Museum of Austin and Malba — Colección Costantini, Buenos Aires among others. These programs aim to provide a response to museums’ urge to build public collections and encourage third parties to generously join this action. Directors and curators of these museums, accompanied by the groups of patrons, will go round the Fair looking for those paradigmatic works by unavoidable artists to be included in their collections.
The series of round tables, debates and presentations that is held in the arteBA Auditorium is based on a Prime Time fringe and its exclusive programming includes special guests and a complementary schedule of diverse activities. The Prime Time programming–with the presence of internationally renowned foreign guests and local specialists–generates a dynamic process that contributes to enrich the present Latin American art debate.
Continuing with this thematic backbone, the series Latin American Circuits / Media Circuits: interaction, role and perspectives is included. Important national and foreign cultural reference personalities (Gustavo Buntinx, José Alberto López, Rosa Olivares, Francisco Reyes Palma, among others) will deal with concerns and different aspects related to Latin American Art and its interrelation in the media.
The discussion boards tend to promote the analysis of strategies to produce actions to encourage the circulating parameters of information. They also see that the regional media transmit a deeper knowledge of the artistic circuits and develop the art market and the media market.
arteBA Contemporary Art Fair has an area especially devoted to those emerging spaces and commercial art galleries which present a general installation scheme that responds to an expounding goal, for them to spread their vision of art–frequently one beyond commercial interests–with the aim of establishing contacts that were not possible before as well as producing purchases and profits within the Fair’s setting.
The Organizing Committee has decided to create an area to enrich the fair’s entire landscape– one with demanding proposals meant to be a challenge for the participating artists; an area to outstand, because of its own characteristics, from the rest of the fair. The committee also aims at having exhibiting artists that can be well differentiated because of the identity of their proposals.
This year arteBA Contemporary Art Fair opens within its premises an area devoted to video-art, called Caja Negra / Cubo Blanco – Espacio de Videos (Black Box/ White Cube — Video Space), presenting a large selection of videos from important collections of international museums, and galleries from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. Caja Negra / Cubo Blanco will undoubtedly be one of the attractions of arteBA Contemporary Art Fair’s next edition.
