All the right moves

Which are the top international art fairs for artists and galleries to be seen and showed at? The summit circuit made simple

Which are the top international art fairs for artists and galleries to be seen and showed at? The summit circuit made simple
Art fairs are networking grounds,where the cream of the art world rub shoulders and twirl their champagne glasses. The art is cutting-edge,international and monumental. Only well-heeled collectors access these privileged buying spaces and being seen at the right place does wonderful things for the price of an artist. Unlike popular fairs like Art Hong Kong,Art Cologne and Art Dubai,where the aim is to generate numbers,the entry fee to events like the Frieze Art Fair held in Regent Park,London,FIAC,Paris,and Art Basel,Switzerland is between 15 and 30 Euros,not targeted at your typical student or working-class viewer.

This ensures that only those truly interested in art are permitted entry. Even then,we are told,the turnout is pretty bigthe 2006 Art Basel in Switzerland reported about 50,000 people at the fair. Delhis Nature Morte and Chemould Art Gallery from Mumbai are two of the five Indian galleries going to Art Basel this June. Setting up a stall is not a walk in the park. There is a waiting list and it costs anything between 30,000 and 60,000 Euros. Indian artists are yet to make it to Art Basel Miami,an exclusive celebrity-studded art fair that is geared more towards showcasing local American art.
So which are the top global art fairs that galleries and artists vie to be seen at? Normally one starts by being noticed at survey shows like the Indian Highway a travelling exhibition hosted by the Serpentine Gallery,London or being featured at local international fairs like the Armory Show,New York,or the Abu Dhabi Art Fair.

But if an artist can present a paper,have her work featured or perform at Documenta de Kassel,Germany,it is as good as finding the Holy Grail. Documenta is a non-commercial intellectual symposium where ideas get tossed around or overboard by heavyweights like famed art critic Geeta Kapur and scholars like Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said. The art and artists featured in these talks get the cutting-edge label and you bet,they are taken seriously by the cognoscenti.

Next in the pecking order is the Venice Biennale,a six-month long non-commercial art fair. Much feted in the Indian art circle,Riyas Komu was first featured there with Nalini Malani in 2007. But he made the cut only after sustained exposure to the international art scene first at fairs such as the Abu Dhabi Art Fair. In 2008,he was showcased at Art Basel by a 30-year-old Italian gallery,Studio La Citta. For the Venice Biennale,my work was selected because the curator,Robert Storr,had conceived the exhibition around violence and war. It was my good luck that he happened to see my work at Sakshi Gallery and it matched his curatorial intent, he says. Recently,the Beinnale opened its gates to let in a flood of Indian artists. In 2009,Anju Dodiya,Sunil Gawde and Nikhil Chopra were the chosen Indian artists to make it. Indian art is at a stage now where it is difficult to ignore us any more. If these reputed art spaces do not feature more than the token Indian,it tends to reflect badly on them, says Geetha Mehra of Sakshi Art Gallery,whose gallery will also be at Basel this summer.

If youre an artist like Subodh Gupta,who already has a huge international presence,you get invited to show at Basela 40-year-old commercial art fair that is not as exclusive as Kassel or Venice but belongs to the next rung of art hot-spots. In 2006,Guptas installation,a conveyor belt with 130 pieces of luggage cast in their actual size,went to the show in Switzerland. This work was designed to give an idea of the oversized,limitless packages that arrive on the conveyor belt at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi when Indians come back after having worked in Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Kuwait, says Gupta.

This time round,Basel is also showcasing a fairly new gallery like the Mumbai-based Chatterjee and Lal and Bangalores Gallery SKE. Chatterjee and Lal focus on performance artwork by avant garde artist Nikhil Chopra in the individual project sectionand this is a case of the gallery benefiting from the artist. While Mortimer Chatterjee is thrilled to be part of Art Basel,he says,The art fairs cannot and should not be your prime focus as a gallery. What you do on home turf at your own gallery and then at international exhibitions like the Armory Show,should be your core activity. Getting selected for the art fair is only the icing on the cake.

Chemould Prescott didnt exactly saunter into Basel. Shireen Gandhy cracked the code after applying five times and her gallery has clawed its way into the Art Feature sectionthey will not be part of the general fair but showcased as a niche element. We propose to juxtapose new paintings by Atul Dodiya with iconic paintings of contemporary Indian art from the 1970s by Bhupen Khakhar. Throughout his career,Dodiya has drawn on Khakhars work, she says.
Others like Peter Nagy, whose Nature Morte has featured twice at Art Basel,says artists and galleries should not be too affected by their fortunes at the fair. We applied thrice to the Frieze Art Fair and were rejected. Now we are not going to bother anymorethere is more to life than art fairs, he says.