The Mermaid's Mirror

I had the chance, yesterday, while wandering across the artworks, to assist to a discussion about the situation of Asian arts. 

The partners of dialogue - held in English - were Anupam Poddar, New Delhi-based collector and Founding Director of Devi Art Foundation (right in the picture below) and Sandhini Poddar, Assistant Curator of Asian Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York. The background was the exhibition Being Singular Plural: Moving Images from India at the Deutsche Guggenheim. 

The focus on Asian - geographical terms covering, from the bureaucratic point of view of the museum' bureaucracies: India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iran - is on the rise for a long time already. Private and public collectors, all over the world, are interested to gather, systematically or not, piece of work from these areas. But, as Anupam Poddar explained, at the regional level, the artistic dialogue is not easy at all, as various visa and political restrictions are diminishing and even blocking the purposive generosity of the intellectual dialogue. The acquisition, by an Indian collector, of an artwork from Pakistan, might be an extremely nervous and time consuming adventure. Hence, the focus on photography and video art, even, for this part of the world, the tradition of a non-imagistic history of arts, following the religious environment, is more representative. I would be interested, for example, to watch a video made by an Iranian artist, but I would be more keen to see the current trend in the traditional Persian painting. 

From the local point of view, the scarce state resources must be the another problem for those interested to share the local artistic heritage. As long as the public resources for cultural initiatives are lacking, the museums cannot enrich their collections, and there are serious gaps in keeping the pace with the very diverse artistic live. For example, in the case of India, the acquisitions stopped eight years ago and the country was not able to have its own Pavilion at the Venice Biennial this year. In this case, the private galleries and collectors are playing a vital role in supporting the artists.

Based on a long family tradition, Anupam Poddar made public his mother collection - of more than 7.000 artworks - in 2008. In the same time, he encouraged various programs of creating skillful and professional curators and arts education in schools. A first step of a different kind of philanthropy, predominantly focused by now in exclusively social projects. 

Art Forum Berlin

As scheduled, I spent a couple of hours yesterday at the Art Forum Berlin. Lots of people, with or without kids, relaxed gallerists - in comparison with the last year, when many of them were a bit disapponted by the negative effects of the economic crisis on their businesses. Some of the galleries - from the US, Italy, Austria, France, Hungary (the new entry this time, I think), the Netherlands - were present this year too, but I was feeling a different wave of optimism. And, in comparison with the last year, I've heard more people asking about prices and artists. Even, in my opinion, some of the prices were impressively high - 13.000 EUR. for a big nature photography, pretty normal, with some trees and some green grass around. A matter of taste, of course.

The price of the ticket, during the day was of 18 EUR., the normal price, but I think it was worthy, as I gathered several free arts magazines, all together making more than 20 EUR. Good food for thought for getting more insights about the new and old trends in the contemporary arts. 

What I liked about this edition? A lot of interesting photographies and video installations, some of them, as I've heard later on, hunted for the new generation of collectors, including for private use, as part of their home designs. It was about time for this too, isn't it?

What I didn't? The contemporary trends of focusing more on the innovative use of various materials and settings than on representation of figurative images. I don't have nothing against the abstract and post-modern art, but I believe that there are still lots of imagistic opportunities to explore and recompose the fragments of reality into coherent images. 

Here, a couple of fragments from some artistic corners I discovered:

I am already curious about the next year fair!

My plans for the w/e

There are still another two days until the week-end, but given the busy cultural life of my host city, I have to prepare everything extremely carefully. A must will be the Art Forum, which I attended also the last year. 

The experience of the last year: a lot of participants, artists and galleries, mostly from the German speaking countries but also from Italy or Latin America, covering almost all the trends of arts. I attended with great pleasure the seminars and workshops dedicated to analyse the mainstream business and creative ideas in the world of galleries. One of the main aim of the participants is to find potential clients for the artworks, but the usual visitor, as me, found a lot of opportunities to think about art in the 21st century.

Can't wait to spend there a couple of hours, together with a very good artist friend - in this way I will have as well a professional perspective and a guarantee of challenging conversations.