Art Riga Fair 2019

The sixth ART RIGA FAIR filled the Latvian Railway History Museum for a week.

A small anniversary

The fair's 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 in Latvia. ART RIGA FAIR brought together not only representatives of contemporary art; the fair also featured Latvia's leading art auction houses: Art Embassy, Jēkabs and Antonia.

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."

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.

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); the Academy of Arts of Uzbekistan; and Assol Sas from Kazakhstan.

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, 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."

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; 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. The week closed with "Art & Platon", a lecture by Alexey Romanov and Igors Vatoļins.

Video artist Elīna Maligina showed "ICON" and "ART SHOWER". Milan's Giordano Morganti brought his "Dr. Frankenstein" retrospective plus a new urban photography cycle. French artist Clair Vital exhibited "Inner Sanctum", a tribute to Tibet. The Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Centre's stand carried work by Brazilian artist Marco G. Giannotti, and the German duo COCOW & DUBROFF showed a series built around chess grandmasters.

Participants