Artbo celebrates 20 years

Artbo celebrates 20 years: from colonization processes to works made with artificial intelligence and the Argentine presence

The Bogotá International Art Fair displays its proposal on five floors until tomorrow; exactly one year after Botero's death, the Colombian's work is present in this editionBOGOTÁ.- "Decadent heirs, degenerates, lazy, opportunists, vagrants, ex-military, ex-convicts, fugitives, thieves, swindlers, hooligans, pickpockets." All those words that are read in a loop, on a screen, at the top of the escalators of the enormous entrance hall of Artbo, the Bogotá International Art Fair, which is being held until tomorrow in the Colombian capital. This is a quote from Karl Marx's The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (about the coup d'état of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon's nephew) that the artist Carmela Gross updates to allude to the formation of modern states. The piece belongs to the Brazilian gallery Vermelho and costs ten thousand dollars.

Created in 2004, Artbo presents in this edition proposals from galleries in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Chile, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Germany, Spain, the United States and France. The fair occupies five exhibition floors, with more than 40 participating galleries and works by some 200 artists. 80 independent publishers and various national cultural institutions also participate.
The Bogota Chamber of Commerce organizes the fair; Procolombia plays a key role in supporting this initiative, an organization in charge of promoting tourism, foreign investment in Colombia, non-mining and energy exports and the image of the country. The atmosphere of joyful expectation is felt in the corridors, which was also evident in the opening night cocktail party where galleries, collectors and artists participated. And no wonder. The fair is celebrating its 20th anniversary, with pieces that address everything from the processes of colonization, indigenous creations, the white gaze on the Afro body and the construction of otherness to works made with artificial intelligence and video art by prominent masters.

In the Projects section, the Colombian gallery Instituto de Visión, based in Bogotá and New York, presents works by two indigenous women artists. Venuca Evanán managed to get her community to allow her to paint, something that only men can do. “She uses traditional techniques, but with absolutely political themes, her focus is on how religion came to colonize the indigenous community, to impose a religion that was not theirs,” says Manuel Becerra, general coordinator of Instituto de Visión, which celebrated a decade with a big party. The invitation included a “survival kit” for the dizzying days of the fair: coca teas, sweets, achiras and painkillers. The space also features a series of paintings by Evanán on queer themes, which Carlos Herrera also addresses at the Argentine gallery Ruth Benzacar.
In the main section, the Parisian 193 brought the series Jardín criollo by the Afro artist Jean Marc Hunt, who lives on Guadalupe Island. And the space of the Colombian gallery La balsa de arte, based in Medellín as well as Bogotá, exhibits works by the local artist Astrid González, who takes phrases from the Bible or texts by white thinkers and philosophers about the body. Her series of photographs shows extreme close-ups of mouths and faces. In addition, she analyzes the social construction of black sexuality and the implications and stigmas generated by the white gaze on the colored body.

The Colombian-French gallery Mor Charpentier exhibits the work of Carlos Motta, a Colombian artist living in New York. Their work Discovering the New World was created with artificial intelligence based on texts by Theodor de Bry, a pseudo-historian of the discovery of America and one of the initial creators of the black and white legends. “De Bry writes stories about the new world, when the first colonizers arrive in the colony. The first texts are famous: many people who made interpretations of the new world were based on those stories. So, this work seeks to revisit how artificial intelligence also regenerates, or creates, how we have been conceived since the colony,” they explain. Each of these works by Motta costs seven thousand dollars. The North American artist Violet Forest also works with artificial intelligence, whose pieces can be seen in the Casa Hoffmann space and condense a large part of the natural landscapes of Medellín (each work costs two thousand dollars).
Read more