The Transformation of an Art Fair — Irene Porras

This year, Madrid will once again be filled with cutting-edge art at the hand of the Inter­na­tional Con­tem­po­rary Art Fair, ARCO. In Feb­ru­ary, artists, gal­leries, cura­tors, col­lec­tors, teach­ers and art enthu­si­asts will all be attend­ing this major event.

The 26th edi­tion of ARCO, with South Korea as this year’s guest coun­try, will con­tain many new fea­tures. With­out a doubt, the most impor­tant of these is the debut of Lour­des Fer­nán­dez (San Sebas­t­ian, 1961), as direc­tor of the fair. She has been the direc­tor of the DV Gallery for ten years, and was in charge of the Man­i­festa 5 Bien­nial. Her pre­de­ces­sor, Rosina Gómez-Baeza, directed ARCO with great energy and per­son­al­ity for 20 years, turn­ing what was ini­tially a get-together of friends and acquain­tances into a lead­ing inter­na­tional art fair. The chal­lenge faced by Lour­des Fer­nán­dez, from this 26th edi­tion onwards, is not only to sus­tain and to exceed the high stan­dard of the event that has passed into her hands, but to boost and find new options for what has become not only an artis­tic and cul­tural event, but also a fun­da­men­tal ref­er­ence for keep­ing track of the art mar­ket of Spain.

New Fea­tures

The 2007 edi­tion of the fair will be a com­bi­na­tion of con­ti­nu­ity and inno­va­tion. The new direc­tor has stated that one of her main pri­or­i­ties is to con­tinue the inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion of the event, par­tic­u­larly in terms of Asia and Latin Amer­ica. On the basis of what has already been achieved, the orga­niz­ers aim to con­firm ARCO’s sta­tus in the world art mar­ket, choos­ing South Korea as the guest coun­try this year, and Brazil for next year. More­over, despite com­pe­ti­tion from Art Basel Miami, ARCO will strive to become the main chan­nel into the Euro­pean mar­ket for Latin Amer­i­can art.

Another goal is to ener­gize the art mar­ket and to encour­age collecting-shoring up ARCO’s role as a sales venue and point of con­ver­gence for the inter­na­tional art mar­ket. With this in mind, invi­ta­tions have gone out to major col­lec­tors from around the world, and a pro­gram has been designed to attract cor­po­rate col­lec­tors, with ARCO offer­ing to pro­vide a sup­port ser­vice for major cor­po­ra­tions that are start­ing to cre­ate their own art col­lec­tions. Along these same lines, ARCO ’07 will expand its professionals-only open­ing hours to two entire days when gal­leries, col­lec­tors and experts will be able to con­duct all of their trans­ac­tions in a pro­fes­sional atmosphere.

To attract a busy mar­ket, in which new and better-established col­lec­tors are com­pet­ing with one another, the fair has made room for quite a num­ber of new gal­leries. As a result of hav­ing been last year’s guest coun­try, some of these gal­leries are from Aus­tria, while many oth­ers are from Ger­many and cen­tral Europe, as well as Por­tu­gal and Latin Amer­ica. There is also a large South Korean pres­ence, open­ing up towards the Asian mar­ket, which is grad­u­ally gain­ing sta­tus on the inter­na­tional art circuit.

The issues that arose over the sum­mer, fol­low­ing sug­ges­tions of polit­i­cal inter­fer­ence in the South Korean pro­gramme, have now been dealt with and Jung-Wha Kim, the direc­tor of the Muse­ums Korea in Seoul, will be co-ordinating the pro­gram along with Jeong Ah Shin, Head Cura­tor of the Sun­gokok Art Museum, who has selected the gal­leries that will take part.

A third high­light of this year’s event is the artic­u­la­tion of the fair’s artis­tic con­tent. Along­side the Gen­eral Pro­gram, the Projects sec­tion will bring together emerg­ing con­tem­po­rary art pro­pos­als selected by cura­tors Carol Lu, David Liss, Moacir dos Anjos, Paola San­toscoy, Fer­nando Cochiar­ale, Tadeo Chiarelli, Ricardo Resende, Vir­ginia Pérez-Ratton and Chus Martínez. Finally, The Black Box, cre­ated in 2005, will again be the venue for view­ing new tech­nolo­gies, elec­tronic art and audio­vi­su­als. This year, cura­tors Car­olina Grau and Marc Olivier Wahler will select works.

The new Direc­tor, fully aware of the weight of the legacy she has received, has cho­sen to make a grad­ual trans­for­ma­tion. The more rad­i­cal changes will take place after 2008, when the fair will move into Halls 12 and 14, renew­ing both its venue and archi­tec­tural design, and also the way in which the con­tent is dis­played. This will be the time for more deep-rooted changes and for a more per­sonal approach to innovation.