ARTBO 2015 closes with great success
The 11th edition of ARTBO, welcomed 84 participating galleries from 33 cities and featured 15 projects, 33 artists in Artecámara, 4 artist-run spaces across its 8 sections: Main Section, Projects, Reference, SITIO, Forum, Artecámara, Articularte and Artist Book.
Since 2005 ARTBO has been a key element of the transformation of the Colombian art scene. Grow- ing from 29 galleries and 12,000 visitors participating on its first edition to 66 galleries from 29 cities and 31,000 visitors in 2014, and now 84 galleries from 33 cities in 2015, ARTBO has proven that Colombia has become a key player in the international art circuit. Drawing attention from international collectors, gallerists, curators, institutions and journalists to the country, the fair is the centre of the “Art Month” in Bogotá.
This edition of ARTBO presented a selection of international leading, emerging and cutting-edge gal- leries, making it a unique art fair within Latin America, with a proposal different from any other fair.
The Main section hosted galleries from 30 cities around the world including Berlin, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Havana, Santiago de Chile, Mexico City, Caracas, London, Bologna, New York, Guatemala City, and Montevideo, amongst others, as well as 15 galleries from Colombia.
Projects, curated by Catalina Lozano and Manuela Moscoso, presented fifteen contemporary artists that showed proposals exploring the idea of subject and context as a complex exchange between the general and the specific, the whole and the part, and between major and minor stories.
The second edition of Reference, curated by Ana Maria Lozano, showed works from 1920 to 1980 by artists who have expanded the boundaries of what is understood to be an artwork, consequently influ- encing our understanding of what is defined as contemporary art.
SITIO, the fair’s newest program offered participating galleries the possibility to propose perfor- mances, sound installations, interdisciplinary works, video installations and happenings that transcend the galleries’ booth area around the fairgrounds.
Artecámara is a non-commercial element of the fair that circulates and showcases the work of promising young Colombian artists. The exhibition, curated by Mariangela Méndez, gathered the ideas of 33 young Colombian artists who looked at the ways in which the individual relates to the cosmos, given a consistently more digitalized reality; and question our future as a species in a world that is shift- ing from the material to the holographic.
Articularte, ARTBO’s participatory platform, presented interactive workshops designed by the artist collective Laagencia where children and the public in general experienced art in a different way ques- tioning the boundaries between art and everyday life.
Forum, curated by José Roca, combined project presentations, debates and conferences around the in- teraction between artistic production (artists), mediation (museums, independent spaces, curators, crit- ics, arts media) and market (gallery, collectors, art fairs and auctions). It also included an unprecedented format of artist performance/talks.
Artist Books presented a select group of art book publishers and distributors creating a space for audi- ences to engage with works that embrace books as an artistic practice.
