Art Market Budapest 2011 signs 42 contemporary galleries, 32 Hungarian

A work by Tamas Dobos, courtesy of Erdesz Galeria & Design, Szentendre

EXCLUSIVE—1^ST INTERNATIONAL ART MARKET BUDAPEST SIGNS UP 42 GALLERIES FOR 26 – 30 OCTOBER FAIR OF EMERGING AND NEW CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS

Art Market Budapest´s curatorial team this week told ArtTraveler it will showcase 32 Hungarian and 10 international galleries at Hungary´s first international Art Market Budapest fair  26 – 30 October at the city´s Millenaris Park.

Admission is free. There is no government funding.

“We´re really satisfied with this year´s fair, our first international one after last year´s pilot edition,” said international relations manager Dr. Zoltan Somhegyi, an independent curator and university lecturer-art historian.

The contemporary art fair will include a range of works from installations, 2D and 3D works as well as a number of group and solo projects, Somhegyi added.

“It´s a real great achievement in this time of crisis, and I am particularly happy with a huge 25 percent from outside Hungary.”

Galleries from London, Austria, Romania, Estonia, the Czech Republic and Slovenia join the Hungarian galleries, all but three from Budapest.

Nancy G. Brinker, former US Ambassador to Hungary and Art Market Budapest 2011´s patron

One of the first Hungarian galleries to register is the internationally known Erdesz Galeria & Design in Szentendre, about 20 kilometers north of Budapest.

I wrote about this gallery and its artists before and after its 8 July opening of contemporary artists while living in Hungary for six weeks this summer.

“Most are welcoming the idea, if not this year then next,” Somhegyi said about his more than 200 direct contacts with galleries, another 200 by his team.

The Art Market Budapest 2011 jury includes: Soraya von Studenberg, advisor to Sotheby´s and Uniqua; Flash Art Magazine editor and Prague Biennale curator, Nicola Trezzi; Lorand Hegyi, director of Sant Étienne´s Museum of Modern Art, and Gabor Gulyas, director of Budapest´s Mucsarnok-Kunsthalle.

Somhegyi, curator for one of two featured Roma contemporary art exhibits--Roma Art Project--said his will display Roma works from private collections, the other, works from a Budapest gallery specializing in Roma art.

 

Panel discussions are also scheduled on Roma contemporary art.

Art Market Budapest 2011 succeeds a pilot endeavor launched in only six weeks last year in a new and vacant office complex.

Somhegyi said at the end of August 2010, a colleague of his received a call that an ideal space to show contemporary was available for free.

Could they quickly put up an art fair of new and emerging contemporary artists?

Work by Anthor Keszeg Nador, oil on canvas, 40 x 40 cm Photograph by Stefan van Drake (2011)

Why not?

In six weeks, 12 to 14 Hungarian galleries exhibited contemporary works.

“It was our pilot edition,” said Somhegyi.

As soon as the pilot ended, the international version entered planning stages, which picked up speed in March.

Serving as the fair´s patron, former U.S. Ambassador to Hungary, Nancy G. Brinker, provides high profile coupled with many international art connections.

Nancy G. Brinker, patron for Art Market Budapest 2011

Brinker collects Hungarian art.

Another feature of the fair is the role of the non-profit cultural engine based in Budapest, Igor Metropol.

It plans to show small format works (10 cm x 10 cm or 3D, 10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm) within an architecturally designed display for as many as 25 artists, said Igor Metropol co-curator Nora Lukacs. 

Her partner in this effort is Katja Melzer.

"Lenin" by Sam Havadtoy, courtesy of B55 Gallery, Budapest

Igor Metropol and UAA [Association of Anonymous Artists, Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina (www.uaa.rs.ba/)] cooperate in promoting this project.

In our phone interview, curator and academic Somegyi said the booth spaces rent from 39 to 47 Euros a meter. Another 24 small booths will be occupied by publishers, magazines and museums.

He confirmed the fair is a private, for-profit affair. While this is 10 times less than in Paris or Dubai, he added, so far, Art Market Budapest 2011's backers are pleased with the results.

“We´re excited since we will be able to provide a better focus on Eastern European contemporary art,” Somhegyi said.

Rock on and practice peace and love.

Stefan, the ArtTraveler ™

ArtTraveler notes:

After living at the Hotel Queen Mary in Budapest (3.5 stars), I heartily recommend it: old on the outside, otherwise totally modern (23 rooms); 

The owner and staff are affable and speak English and German. Tel: 0036-1-413-3510; www.hotelqueenmary.hu; info@hotelqueenmary.hu.

Visit Andalusia for a walking holiday or week-long sculpture or mosaics workshop. 

See: www.spanjeanders.nl and www.competafinearts.com.

"Spanish Life Stilled," photograph by Stefan van Drake (2009)

You may reach me at stefanvandrake@gmail.com or by calling (34) 915 067 703 or from the UK at BT landline rates, 0844 774 8349.

"Full Moon Porta-Potty" at Sziget Festival 2011 - Budapest Photograph by Matthew Z. Zomick

4th Moscow Biennale: Is art activism challenging the state dead in Russia?

Peter Weibel, "Synthesis" 1967 (c) Peter Weibel

The young radical conceptual art activist Peter Weibel of 1967 appears above somewhere in Vienna.

Now, at age 67, he navigates his 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art--"Rewriting Worlds"--as chief curator and diplomat, avoiding any political friction with Putin´s Russia.

BEFORE & AFTER

Leonid Brezhnev, author of the invasion and occupation of Czechoslavakia, 1968

Putin as Brezhnev from (c) Moscow Times 30 Sept. 2011, no credit stated for art

The art I found most satirical and if I were Putin, politically unsettling, appeared on page one of the Moscow Times on 30 September without the artist´s credit and likely for good reason. 

Scores of journalists have been murdered since Putin stepped down as a Lt. Colonel in the KGB and stepped up to rule Russia with a firm grip.

You see the digitally aged, paunchy Vladamir Putin wearing Leonid Brezhnev´s uniform. As you look at the two, it´s not really a beauty contest.

It provokes memories of Soviet  May Day, Red Square parade reviews. (I speak Russian and traveled in the USSR for three weeks in 1976 and 1985.)

 

Would artist-dissidents be imprisoned or killed in today´s Russia? 

They kill journalists, why not unruly, trouble-making contemporary artists like Ai Weiwei?

Peter Weibel now

In 1985, three avant-garde artists in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) did three years in prison for a wall installation condemning state repression of artististic freedom.

“We won´t exclude any form of artistic expression,” Weibel said in August in a news release on his show´s official website.

(Except patently provocative and politically potent art unkind to Russia´s rulers.)

A work by Moscow´s Blue Soup Group

Weibel, born in Odessa but living outside the former USSR in Austria during the Cold War, and now in Karlsruhe, Germany, navigates a course of caution and moderation. 

Evolution not revolution.

The closest he´s come to making waves is hosting an Ai Weiwei politically impotent video.

Weibel and the Russian Federation got some back-channel pressure from China to kill the Ai Weiwei submission, according to online news reports.

By Russian group Electo Boutique

Weibel and Russia stood firm, grabbed some banal but positive headlines, as though championing freedom of artistic expression.

At about the same time, Weibel released a list of the 81 participating artists he curates in the main exhibition before its 22 September opening.

It was not in alphabetical order. There was no order, just chaotic listing.

Weibel put Ai Weiwei at No. 78, which might have cheered Chinese authorities.

Who knows? Such gestures may carry diplomatic weight.

The Learning Film Group, video 2008 Vyscany Congress (Nikolay Oleynikov, Yevgeny Fiks, Ilya Budraitski)

While Weibel´s biennale of artists from 33 countries presents an ambitious agenda through its 30 October closing, its curator has buried the body politic.

Russian artists, if their Google images reflect what´s showing, fail to take their works into the political domain, not even satirizing Putin´s plutocracy as did the Moscow Times on 30 September.

In the exhibition´s press kit, Weibel said he studied about 300 portfolios from Russian artists. 

He noticed what he called a tendency for “decompression” and “deframing.”

Weibel described “deframing” as artists withdrawing works from public places “to protect the autonomy of the artwork.”   

I have no clue what happens to an artist who decompresses.

This must be his euphemism for artists going into hiding, scared they and their works would be confiscated, imprisoned, as many were during Soviet years.

The separation between art and politics operates in China. It appears to be the norm in Russia.

A work by Valery Chtak

Mural fragment by Alina Gutkina

Can unfettered expression of non-political contemporary art erode autocratic regimes, eventually liberalizing political as well as artistic freedom?

Let´s discuss it. There are more posts on this subject coming. Be a part of the discourse.

Note: I examined images of works by 10 Russian artists Weibel touted at a news conference (some of their works appear in this post).

As well, I randomly surveyed images of 13 of the 34 Russian artists or groups participating in the separate “International Festival of Activist Art” curated by Tatiana Volkova, Anna Dikovich, Roman Minaev and Arseniy Sergeev.

It opened 24 September and closes 10 October.

A work by Taisiya Korotkova (2010)

Islamic art and design at Granada´s Alhambra, photograph by Stefan van Drake (2009)

Rock on and practice peace and love.

Stefan, the ArtTraveler (TM)

Visit Andalusia for a walking holiday or week-long sculpure or mosaics workshops. See: www.spanjeanders.nl. and www.competafinearts.com.

Contact me about arts happenings: stefanvandrake@gmail.com or call (34) 951 067 703 or from the UK at BT landline rates, 0844 774 8349.

Beijing-based Alessandro Rolandi's new performance video, "Born Again? No, I?m Not" & the human bread chain

"BORN AGAIN? NO, I?M NOT" 2011, performance video by Alessandro Rolandi, photo courtesy of the artist

BORN AGAIN? NO, I?M NOT

A performance video by Alessandro Rolandi

You can watch the video at: 

http://vimeo.com/28541038  password: born

Beijing-based contemporary artist and academic Alessandro Rolandi´s spiritual video, "Born Again? No, I?m Not" opened Saturday, 1 October in Verona, Italy at the ArtVerona Internatiional Art Fair. 

From there it opens in Milan, then in Cairo and Jordan, Rolandi said.

Alessandro Rolandi´s artist´s statement for Born Again? No, I?m Not


"The video uses the situations and the rhythms of the golden era of mute cinema and the likes of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, etc., to build a contemporary, ironical sketch on the topic of religion and spirituality.

"The character, wearing a mental institution uniform, (perhaps a prison outfit or old-fashioned bathhouse one) is creating the three symbols of the Christian, the Muslim and the Jewish religions.

"The word Allah is made with azime bread.

"The Star of David is made with Christian ostias bread.

"The Cross is made with Arab pitta bread.

"In all religions bread is the simplest and most important food; all religions are considered 'nourishement for the spirit' and often use bread as the key food for rituals.

"The character conducts a presumably 'naive' action, playing with the symbols and the types of bread.

"It is as though he wants to feed on all of them, yet at the same time, he asks himself, 'Are they really different?'

"Why? 

"How?

"After drawing the symbols with the bread, he [Rolandi] starts dancing around them and eating them in a sort of euphoria.

"During this process he sees the symbols mixing one into another and in a semi-conscious condition, he creates a new image, a landscape with a mountain and a house.

"Then he simply looks at it and comfortably lays down inside the house of bread and sleeps."

Alessandro Rolandi--Beijing 2011



Alessandro Rolandi, age 40, is artist in residence at Harrow International School, Beijing since 2003, teaching art and experimental theatre. He has taught or lectured in eight schools, including the Institut d´Edudes de Paris. He is also a film maker, actor, theatre director and author. Rolandi, born in Pavia, Italy, has staged at least 12 solo exhibitions and participated in more than 23 group shows.

Alessandro Rolandi, photo courtesy of the artist

His mission:


"I observe, borrow, change and document reality to create possibilities that challenge our current socio-political structures and point out the effects they have on our daily life and on our scheme of thought."











Curator Cecilia Freschini asked
Rolandi to create a work on spirituality.
 

"Art should open new territories to itself. This is what great artists did...enlarge the spectre, the territory, the mapping process."

--Alessandro Rolandi, October 2011

I asked Rolandi to prepare an essay specifically for this post discussing the pathos and ethos behind "Born again? No, I?m not".

This is his exclusive to ArtTraveler:

"Along the years I realized that the more I wanted to keep my spirituality alive, the less I had to talk about it or share it or explain it.

"We live in a media-dominated and manipulated society where acceleration and competition actually put "a little war machine" in every aspect of life.

Untitled by Alessandro Rolandi Photograph courtesy of the artist

"Whenever we fall into the trap of delivering our message in a 'serious' way, we somehow propose to substitute our own idea/vision/message to the mainstream one we are attacking.

"With religion--no matter which one--this risk runs much higher.

"The French defined and defended 'laicism' for a longtime, or briefly, 'the separation between Church (religion in absolute terms) and State.'

"This principle becomes vital to preserve the possibility of an open dialogue between different cultures.

"Spirituality and religion are, in my opinion, better cultivated and preserved within the personal and intimate sphere of individuals.

"Whenever they bypass it, they become suspicious and potentially harmful to mutual tolerance and understanding.

"Old Beijing Man" by Alessandro Rolandi Photograph courtesy of the artist

"My video adopts this principle and develops it using a simplified version of the language of mute-comic movies since their early tradition.

"I rely on humor as a weapon to test both people's 'good intentions' and intelligence. We all know that the 'fool' is the only one allowed to whisper an uncomfortable truth to king's ear.

"If I try to remember art works capable of instigating or provoking public attention and infiltrating people's minds with the only purpose of making them think, I end up thinking about Charlie Chaplin or Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, or the caustic early works of Maurizio Cattelan.

Alessandro Rolanding performing his "Born Again, No, I?m Not" 2011 video Photograph courtesy of the artist

"Today as never before, we should be able to deal with increasingly different and contrasting logics, lifestyles, proposals and visions by studying, preserving and protecting variety and difference.

"We can create a 'global civil association' driven by intelligence and sensitivity that can try to find local or specific solutions in economics, society and politics to avoid disaster.

"For this reason, not only academism and post-modernism in art but also art as mere practice itself needs to be bypassed to play a meaningful role in society. 

"Creating impacting art means we need to use all tools and all knoweldge to trigger responses.

"On another level, the video functions as a documentation of an action, an action which is a game in which a message and a wish are conveyed through simple and symbolic signs and elements (the body, the clothes, the concrete floor, the bread, the funny dance, the religious symbols, the action of eating ).

"Bread Tree" by Alessandro Rolandi

"Performance, documented by video allows technology to become functional to body expression, instead of the other way around (an actual tendency).

"This expresses the purpose to find again a connection between body and desire in a time when entertainment technology is in the process of splitting the two.

"Leaving desire free of meaning allows it freedom to feed itself on an everlasting, virtual feedback of compulsive behaviors in which meaning and awareness are totally absent.

"The living body, the performing body, resists alienation and puts forward the complexity, the fragility and the subtleness of creativity. 

"A meaningful use of technology enlarges the territory of communication and the quality of experience by means of integration instead of substitution, creating new possibilities.


"Art should open new territories to itself. This is what great artists did...enlarge the spectre, the territory, the mapping process."

Islamic art and design at Granada´s Alhambra, photograph by Stefan van Drake (2009)

Rock on and practice peace and love.

Stefan, the ArtTraveler (TM)

Visit Andalusia for a walking holiday or week-long sculpure or mosaics workshops. See: www.spanjeanders.nl. and www.competafinearts.com.

Contact me about arts happenings: stefanvandrake@gmail.com or call (34) 951 067 703 or from the UK at BT landline rates, 0844 774 8349.

ArtTraveler Photo Gallery: "Spanish Cloud Study" in Andalusia mountains

"Mountain Clouds II" Photograph by Stefan van Drake (2011)

"Mountain Clouds III" Photograph by Stefan van Drake (2011)

"Mountain Clouds IV" Photograph by Stefan van Drake (2011)

"Mountain Clouds V" Photograph by Stefan van Drake (2011)

"Mountain Clouds VI" Photograph by Stefan van Drake (2011)

"Mountain Clouds VII" Photograph by Stefan van Drake (2011)

"Mountain Clouds VIII" Photograph by Stefan van Drake (2011)

"Mountain Clouds IX" Photograph by Stefan van Drake (2011)

"Mountain Clouds X" Photograph by Stefan van Drake (2011)

"Mountain Clouds XI" Photograph by Stefan van Drake (2011)

Rock on and practice peace and love.

Stefan, theArtTraveler™

Art travel to Andalusia, to our mountains for a week-long mosaics or sculpture workshop or walking holiday. 


See:  www.spanjeanders.nl and www.competafinearts.com.

Islamic art and design at Granada´s Alhambra, photograph by Stefan van Drake (2009)

Contact me at stefanvandrake@gmail.com or by calling (34) 951 067 703, or from the UK at BT landline rates, 0844 774 8349.

ArtTraveler video offering: A most talented soprano sax player scores coins at Southward Underground Station, London.

ArtTraveler Photo gallery: "Losing control of your camera in Malaga"

"Litttle Boxes on Malaga Beach" Photograph by Stefan van Drake (2011)

"Rollin', Rollin', Rollin" Photograph by Stefan van Drake (2011)

"Black & White People on Malaga Wall" Photograph by Stefan van Drake (2011)

"Breaking Colors II" Photograph by Stefan van Drake (2011)

"UV Reflections" Photograph by Stefan van Drake (2011)

"Still Life" Photograph by Stefan van Drake (2011)

"Life II" Photograph by Stefan van Drake (2011)

"White Spanish Dress & Long Black Shadows" Photograph by Stefan van Drake (2011)

"What Glitters..." Photograph by Stefan van Drake (2011)

"A Willing God" Photograph by Stefan van Drake (2011)

Rock on and practice peace and love.

Stefan, theArtTraveler™

Art travel to Andalusia, to our mountains for a week-long mosaics or sculpture workshop or walking holiday. See: www.spanjeanders.nl and www.competafinearts.com.

Islamic art and design at Granada´s Alhambra, photograph by Stefan van Drake (2009)

Contact me at stefanvandrake@gmail.com or by calling (34) 951 067 703, or from the UK at BT landline rates, 0844 774 8349.

ArtTraveler video offering: A most talented soprano sax player scores coins at Southward Underground Station, London.