Art Riga Fair 2019

The sixth ART RIGA FAIR filled the Latvian Railway History Museum for a week, brought a Japanese gallery to Riga for the first time, and, for the first time in the fair's own history, closed with a contemporary art auction.

A small anniversary

The fair's own 2019 manifesto framed the edition as a first modest milestone rather than a grand one, and looked back on six years of running an independent art market inside a former locomotive depot.

ART RIGA is celebrating its first small anniversary this year, six years. As they say, today's six is yesterday's sixty… but truly, in this time the world has changed, and we have changed with it. Together with our participants we have searched for paths of development, celebrated small creative victories, argued over strategy, visualised and reached seemingly impossible goals. We thought and talked about art and war, about peace in the world and within ourselves, about art and borders, about the self and the stranger. We pushed at the edges of the accepted and studied the world through David Datuna's optical lenses. ART RIGA FAIR manifesto, 2019 (translated from the original Latvian)

The manifesto also renewed an old ambition out loud: "Why shouldn't Riga become the new Basel?" It thanked the ambassadors of the fair's participating countries and Latvia's President, Raimonds Vējonis, for their support, "and the many hundreds of participants, technical and information partners whose wonderful work makes up ART RIGA 2019."

Galleries from more than twenty countries

The 2019 gallery list, published on artriga.com under "Program-Manifesto", ran to roughly eighty names. Read as a map, it stretched from Tokyo to Caracas: Japan, Germany, Canada, Iceland, Poland, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the United States, Israel, France, Switzerland, Venezuela, Belarus, Ukraine, Italy, the Czech Republic, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Russia and host nation Latvia.

The headline debut was Systema Gallery from Japan, its first appearance at ART RIGA. The fair's own preview promised visitors "a chance to communicate with Japanese artists and see current Eastern tendencies." A short walk away, David Datuna (USA) was folded into the fair's own self-image, literally: the manifesto describes the organisers looking back on their six years "through David Datuna's optical lenses," a nod to the Georgian-American artist's signature spectacle sculptures.

Other names the fair singled out in its own galleries list: Krokin Gallery (Moscow), which held a dedicated stand presentation during the week; Van Golik Gallery (Poland); Bali Art (Indonesia); Roter Klee (Berlin, Germany); DK Gallery (Belarus); Art Ego Gallery (Ukraine); Bora Arte (Italy); the veteran Czech photographer Jan Saudek; the Academy of Arts of Uzbekistan; Assol Sas from Kazakhstan; and Georgia's Baratashvili gallery. Canada's Voyzx Fine Art Project brought, in the fair's own words, "an international roster of artists, including some vivid names from Los Angeles," and held stand conversations with artists during the week.

Among the Latvian participants, the manifesto's gallery list named Happy Art Museum (the fair's own producing gallery, showing Juris Dimiters, Zigmunds Bielis, Aigars Tavkins, Dags Vidulejs and Normunds Brasliņš), EuroClub, Art Embassy, Antonia Gallery, Jēkabs Gallery, Skulme Generation, the Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Centre, Neputns publishing house, Birkenfelds Gallery, Art Gallery 19, Gallery Tornis (Sigulda), and the Oforta Ģilde print workshop, among many others. A Petersburg fixture of the fair, the Mitki creative union founded by artist Dmitry Shagin, returned once again. The organisers themselves call this participation "a tradition."

The fair's first auction

For the first time in ART RIGA's six years, the week closed with a contemporary art auction, run jointly by several of Latvia's own auction houses and galleries: Art Embassy, the Jēkabs gallery and auction house, the classical art gallery Antonia, and the Baltic Auction House. The fair's own listing put the auction on the calendar for the Saturday of fair week, alongside a "Business Lady Club" gathering, at 17:00.

Discussions, a dialogue on art and war, and a cinema in a railway carriage

ART RIGA's intellectual programme was, as usual, as dense as its stands. Art critic Simon Hewitt (Oxford) gave a lecture titled "From Budapest to Baku: a year in the life of an art critic," and moderated a round table on "people and art traffic." Architecture theorist Alexander Rappaport, who by 2019 was also showing his own paintings at the fair (acrylics on primed cardboard, made in Mazirbe, Kurzeme, since he took up painting seriously in his old age), took part in a discussion titled "Art in an Urban Environment," moderated by architecture journalist Igors Vatoļins. As part of the EuroClub's recurring "Art and War" conversation, hosted again in 2019, Rappaport offered this, mid-discussion:

When I walked through the stands and looked at the works on display, I understood that a war is being fought in almost every picture. A war with whom? It's not clear. Perhaps the real war is between the necessity of an artistic gesture and its own constraint, and every artist fights this war with themselves. Alexander Rappaport, architecture theorist, ART RIGA FAIR discussion "Art and War" (2019, translated from the Russian)

Dr Andris Teikmanis presented Documento Futurae: Eight Future Art Scenarios (2019), an artistic research project developed at the Art Academy of Latvia, using political, economic and technological uncertainty to sketch possible future roles for art. A lecture connected Latvia's folklore to deeper time, "Latvia is more than 100, it is at least 10,000": a talk on the sacred sun calendar, given by Ivo Purviņš with Icelandic artist Ulfur Karlsson and curator Ilze Pavāre.

On stage and around the halls: an AGNI Project concert-performance; performances by the Frida Art Foundation (Berlin, Moscow); an Oforta Ģilde mobile print workshop running etchings live through the week; a creative workshop for children; and, every evening, ART RIGA CINEMA, short films screened inside a narrow-gauge railway carriage parked in the museum, in keeping with the venue. The week closed with "Art & Platon", a lecture by Alexey Romanov and Igors Vatoļins.

The Latvian Railway History Museum itself, founded in 1994 in a former locomotive depot on the left bank of the Daugava, hosted the fair in its Large Hall, roughly 1,050 square metres of exposed brick and 6.5-metre ceilings, alongside its own permanent rolling stock.

Notable names on the stands

"There is only contemporary art and nothing else"

Asked by lsm.lv how the fair drew its lines between genres and categories, organiser Gaļina Maksimova pushed back on the premise entirely.

We don't divide things up so much, for us there is only contemporary art and nothing else. Gaļina Maksimova, ART RIGA FAIR organiser, lsm.lv (2019)