Programming at arteBA 2016

Prime Time 2016

The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time: How to revitalize art scenes past, present, and future

Coordinated by Victoria Noorthoorn (Director at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires).

One of the great challenges set for us by works of art is the passage of time. From a constantly moving present, art encourages us to reflect on its genesis and history, its current importance and future relevance. Artists, collectors, and gallery owners, historians and directors of art institutions, critics and theorists, all deal in the inexorability of the passing of time and its pulverizing mechanics.

For this series of roundtable discussions celebrating twenty-five years of arteBA, we have called on various professionals in the arts who have, throughout their practices and careers, chosen to take up this challenge from independent, entirely personal and daring viewpoints. These are professionals and creators who have taken a stand against the status quo and made a steadfast commitment to personal utopias. Theirs is an attempt to bring to light what impassions us most: the individual work, the plurality of its meanings, its invitation to reflect on the coordinates of the world around us and the present time.

Thursday, May 19 – 6 pm

To Construct the Past is to Debate the Present.

The art of the past was once an art of the present and, before it came into existence, it was an art of the future: pure imagination or images of the mind. Every artist has planted in their work a vision of their world, of their here-and-now, and a vision for the future. This work was once embedded in a context that has now vanished into thin air, while yet containing distinctive clues for its retelling that help us piece together a sense of period. Historical museums nowadays debate how best to present the arts of the past, how to bring the codes of other times closer to our own here-and-now. The bravest curators get their hands dirty, hunt down unique stories, stick their necks out to debate the foundations of the more conventional art histories. Many times, this is a struggle against the fetishizing of the artwork. How can we keep alive the utopias of the great works of art, their concerns, their desires, their ideas—and their voids too, their soulsickness? How can the museum become a platform to rescue the debates in which the work participated and took on meaning?

Friday, May 20 – 6 pm

To Grasp the Present is to Liberate Art. 

The present does not exist; it is merely the name we give to the moment when the future becomes the past. And yet the art of the present is always richer and more varied than the art we preserve or can imagine. It is art in a state of flux, defying the future and trying not to topple into the catacombs of the past. How can we prevent what we create today from becoming trapped in airtight categories, from being stereotyped by fads or canons, or simply from being forgotten? This is art’s struggle with the great history of art, or with the many histories of art. How can we stage the dynamics of the present? How can we share with society the cauldron of ideas, dreams, and works being projected today by thousands of artists alone or collectively in response to their present, in their battle with the future they imagine is in store? We invite art professionals to share with us some of the battles they have dared to fight through the institutions they operate in.

Saturday, May 21 – 6 Pm

To Imagine the Future is to Change the World.

Faced with a conventional future erected on established formulas, few dare to radically rethink the operating systems of the present in order to create futures tailored precisely to their imaginations. In art, though many of us professionals operate on a basis of optimism and blind faith in the relevance of culture in the lives of today’s women and men, those who really turn things around, who really stick their necks out for new models of thought, are few in number. Our invitation goes out to a few of those professionals who are daring to change the world.

Speakers:

• Mélanie Bouteloup (Paris, Co-founder and the current Director of Bétonsalon – Centre d´art et de recherché).
  
• Diana Campbell Betancourt (Bangladesh, Artistic Director of the Samdani Art Foundation in Bangladesh and the Chief Curator of the Dhaka Art Summit).
  
• Andrés Duprat (Buenos Aires, Director at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes).
  
• Marina Fokidis (Athens, Founder and Artistic Director at the Kunsthalle Athena).
  
• Marcelo Pacheco (Buenos Aires, Adviser of the heritage of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires).
  
• Osvaldo Sánchez Crespo (Ciudad de México, Director of the project inSite/Casa Gallina).
  
• András Szántó (Nueva York, Moderator of the Global Museum Leaders Colloquium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art de Nueva York).
  
• Javier Villa (Buenos Aires, Senior curator at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires).
  
• Katharina von Ruckteschell-Kate (San Pablo, Director of the Goethe-Institut São Paulo).
  

Presentations 2016

Thursday, May 19 – 4 pm

Art Conversation. 

The artist Tomás Saraceno converses with Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, curator of the 6th edition of U-TURN Project Rooms by Mercedes-Benz.

FRIDAY, MAY 20 – 4 PM. 

CPR South America

10 international visions about the scenes of Bogotá, Santiago de Chile and Buenos Aires. With Chris Sharp (USA), Fatos Ustek (Turkey), Gean Moreno (USA), iLiana Fokianaki (Greece), Jepkorir Rose Kiptum (Kenya), Karina Kottová (Czech Republic), Melanie Roumiguière (Germany), Nikita Yingqian Cai (China), Pablo José Ramírez de León (Guatemala) and Robert Leckie (United Kingdom) share their experience and the highlights of the CPR South America Program tour, in five agile and distended presentations. CPR hosts in Buenos Aires: Jorgelina Dacil Infer and Marina Reyes Franco. CPR Director: Carmen Ferreyra.

SATURDAY, MAY 21 – 4 PM.

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985. 

Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta, curators of the exhibition Radical Women, will be in conversation with artists Paz Errázuriz and Marie Orensanz. This exhibition will open at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in September 2017 under the umbrella of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, and focuses on Latin American, Latina and Chicana artists who developed their work around the body and its aesthetic and political emancipation. The conversation will address the exhibition from the perspective of the creative experiences of the two artists, considering terms such as women, art, feminism, representation, emancipation, and resistance.

SUNDAY, MAY 22 – 4 PM. 

CPR Film Festival. Closer to the Border. 

Curated by Tainá Azeredo (Brazil). Tainá participated in October 2015 in the first edition of Curatorial Program for Research – Eastern Europe: Finland and Estonia, and was invited to prepare this film, especially for the 25th anniversary edition of arteBA. The experience of the trip, crossing borders, countless invisible lines defining one side or the other. A selection of 6 films that address issues about the limit in this border in in which structures, language, values, policies, stories, desires and traumas are defined. Multiple views of relations between the lines of limitations of spaces and subjects, between scientific thought and mythic, history and dreams. Artists: Jaan Toomik (Estonia); Axel Straschnoy (Finland / Argentina); Regina Parra (Brazil); Marge Monko (Estonia); Långström Minna (Finland). CPR Development Director: Jorgelina Dacil Infer (moderator). CPR Director: Carmen Ferreyra. With the support of Fundación Iberoamericana de Finlandia.

Sunday, May 22 – 5 pm

CPR Film Festival. Closer to the Border. 

Curated by Tainá Azeredo (Brazil). First screening.