hiroportamiindietro: MiArt 2008 --- see you there!

Enzo Guaricci
don-azione
2003
resine e polvere di marmo
35 x 35 x 15cm

MiArt 2008 the 13th edition of Milan's International Modern and Contemporary Art Fair won't fail to surprise with its new features and projects. This unique event turns Milan into a prestigious showcase for art and a point of reference for collectors, gallery operators, artists and curators.
Like last year, MiArt will take place in the Portello pavilions of fieramilanocity between 4 and 7 April, with the invitation-only inauguration scheduled for Thursday, 3 April. MiArt is reasserting its role as the only trade show in Italy able to offer a complete panorama of the art world through its 3 separate sections that encompass modern art to the most innovative voices of contemporary art. Together, the 3 sections, Modern, Contemporary, and Anteprima take in Italian and international art from the historic avant-garde to the most recent experimental works, attracting collectors with different interests and backgrounds.

Kro Art Gallery
Peter Assmann / Iberia Medici
NON VEDO L'HORA
2007
wandteppich / arazzo
180x83cm
MiArt 2008: a benchmark and a meeting point for the art world that, for this edition too, will see the participation of internationally respected gallery operators, critics and collectors, as well as the directors of prestigious museums.
Thanks to the increasing collaboration with the public and private sectors, over recent years there have been numerous cultural and art events presented during the exhibition under the umbrella title "fuoriMiArt" - an unmissable program that promises to present the most exciting events in the whole city. The numerous parallel events testify in a tangible way to MiArt's desire to establish an ongoing dialogue with the city of Milan and transform the exhibition into a fully fledged arts festival.

Focus on Latin American Art

MiArt 2008 is continuing its program of inviting galleries, artists and dealers from one particular geographical area. The decision to run the Guest Nation program over the last three years stems from a desire to look beyond the globalization of styles and tendencies that can blur differences and highlight the unique qualities of local art.

As a part of pursuing this goal, the prestigious conference “Cina Intra/Extra Ovest,” chaired two years ago by Hans Ulrich Obrist, will return – probably in Beijing – with the goal of catching up on a country where time passes quickly and seeing what effect this has on its art.

Last year’s focus on the Netherlands had different objectives. It was intended to be a look at a country (in some ways similar to Italy, and therefore easier to understand) whose system for promoting contemporary art is probably unrivaled in the Western world. With the exhibition staged in a city where there’s heated debate over the urgency of a museum, this system offered many points for reflection.

And in 2008 the focus is on Latin America, a group of countries in perennial transformation in which the exigencies of art are defining a political and cultural identity. The Latin American artists featured by international galleries and galleries from Central and South America reveal a crosspollination of languages, of an art that, despite the pressures towards uniformity, indicates a strong identity and incredible bonds with particular localities.

In contemporary Latin American art, different languages and an abandoning of traditional techniques in favor of extra-pictorial media are the tools artists use to tell their stories of a great region that is looking for a model for autonomous development. The emergencies of social disintegration and exclusion that the various democratic governments are facing come alive in the region's art, in which the urban space – as the focal point of change and contradiction – is often the central theme. Like nowhere else in the West, where we embrace the areas away from cities, in Latin American it is in the cities that new artistic messages and national identities are taking shape.

And it is from the cities that, since the 1980s, the Latin American artworks featured in biennials around the world have come and that are triggering so much interest internationally. This is an art of reality in which a profound knowledge of the individual leads to a lucid and passionate interpretation of the events taking place today in each artist's country.

The Anteprima section of MiArt 2008 features a group of international galleries, coordinated by the Spanish-Cuban Omar-Pascual Castillo, that will focus on the creativity of Latin American.

Named by Castillo as “En el posterior de las American,” the man who conceived the project has this to say about it:

With MiArt 2008 the first host of Project Rooms dedicated to Latin American art at an Italian art fair, I believe that bringing together a selection of artistic identities – artists who work in Latin America, the United States and Europe – was the best perspective to take on what is an ongoing dialogue.

“En el posterior de las Américan” therefore presents artists and galleries that aspire to speak of an outward and return journey of infinite reciprocity, a path of relocation – not just physical, but, in particular, subjective, which can have no other end but reciprocal and cumulative enrichment.

The exhibition centers on Project Rooms that focus on the recycled experiences of the artists and their perception of this reality. Thus, a Mexican gallery can present a Texan–New Yorker artist; a Dominican or Madrid gallery, a Cuban artist; a Catalan gallery, an Argentinean artist living – by no coincidence – in New York.

Since a Project Room is a legitimizing place in the context of an art fair, with a transient yet effective exhibition exuberance and fragmentary but also design possibilities, I’m enamored by the idea of presenting individuals active in the art world in the form of these fleeting, concentrated prisms. This is a world in which an encyclopedic approach is not possible and the maps must be part of a process whose ending you cannot guess. The decision to focus on the artist is more than obvious to me, since it corresponds to the interpretation of the continent in which we are located as mere observers.

And, at times, we can only recall the “legible paths" of artists capable of creating esthetic-poetic works.