English
Barcelona gets taken over by images and art between the 19th and 21st May with the biggest video art fair in Europe, Loop Festival 2011, organised by Screen Project S.L. As with each year, dozens of national and international artists working with video art will descend upon the city, projecting in various different spaces.
Loop is a platform dedicated to the image, which has found in Barcelona its annual meeting point for creators, curators, viewers, distributors, gallerists and specialists to go along to exhibitions, projections, conferences and presentations.
Loop Festival started in 2003 with the proposal to create a key reference point for video art for gallerists, critics and potential buyers, and anybody else interested in the new expression of art. The exhibition spaces will be inside Hotel Catalonia Ramblas amongst others.
One of the conferences on offer at Loop will be a conversation between British painter, sculptor and videoist Mark Wallinger and professor at Royal College of Art in London, and art critic at The Guardian, Adrian Searle, at the Hotel Catalonia Ramblas.
Wallinger is one of the most interesting artists working in England, and is known for the originality of his work. In 2007, he won the Turner Prize for his piece Sleeper, which is a recording the artist made over ten nights at Berlin´s Neue Nationalgalerie Museum, which he spent dressed as bear. But the work that brought him to be included in the prize shortlist was State Britain, an installation made with slogan placards like those of Brian Haw, who for seven years demonstrated outside The Houses of Parliament.
Another interesting conference on the festival agenda comes from the Ellipse Fundation, and will be held at Hotel Catalonia Ramblas. The foundation was established in 2008 with the aim of supporting artists in various different ways – such as buying the work, lending financial backing, helping with publication, etc. The Foundation has a collection of around 900 pieces of contemporary art of all different disciplines such as video, painting, installation, photography, etc, which are organised into three sections – the emergent from the 70s, then work from the 80s-2000, and the 21st century.
Not everybody can participate in the Loop Fair – you need to be invited by the organisation, according to the guidelines and specification. The other thing is the invitation to the galleries, which is through a committee presided over by Paris collector Jean-Conrad Lemaître, alongside other collectors Isabelle Lemaître, Marc and Rosee Gensollen; gallerist Christopher Grimes from Santa Monica, California. The advisory committee includes collector Manuel de Santaren from Boston, and gallerist Anita Beckers from Frankfurt, Germany.
For more information http://www.loop-barcelona.com/es/index.php
Nancy Guzman
Don´t miss this huge art event if you are renting Barcelona accommodation – or the city´s night life for that matter.
Translated by: Poppy
