arteBA Foundation presents arteBA Focus / Distrito de las Artes

October 2016, Buenos Aires. Amid the celebrations for the 25 years of arteBA, and in collaboration with the Government of the City of Buenos Aires, the arteBA Foundation is pleased to present arteBA Focus / Distrito de las Artes, a new platform for exhibiting contemporary Argentine art, which will take place on November 12 and 13 (with a pre-opening on November 11) at Arenas Studios (Av. Pedro de Mendoza 965, La Boca).

arteBA Focus / Distrito de las Artes is a fair in curatorial form, devised especially for Argentine galleries. It offers a new form for exhibiting, promoting, and selling contemporary art. The curatorial committee, made up of Florencia Battiti and Mariana Rodríguez Iglesias, has the task of working with the 31 participating galleries representing a total of 80 artists and works to be displayed in an ad hoc layout designed by Ariel Jacubovich. Also collaborating on the selection of pieces using video is curator Karina Granieri.

During this weekend, a retinue of professionals, collectors and museum directors from all over Argentina will be part of arteBA Private Tour, a program devised to strengthen the ties with the entire country’s art scene and its major players. In this second edition – the first of which, in 2015, offered a survey of 22 galleries in the City of Buenos Aires – participants will visit the main cultural institutions in the Arts District. In the course of the tour a special guided visit of arteBA Focus will be offered, in addition to breakfasts with curators, receptions in museums and art galleries, and special events.

ABOUT THE CURATORS

Florencia Battiti (Buenos Aires, 1965). Art historian and curator of Parque de la Memoria. Full professor of Modern and Contemporary Argentine Art in the Exchange program of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT). Member of the Editorial Council of Public Art Dialogue, a specialized periodical on public art, published by the Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Winner of the Trabucco Research Prize (2013). She is currently Vice-President of the Argentine Art Critics Association (AACA) and works as adviser at the Bienal de Arte Contemporáneo de América Latina (BIENALSUR).

Mariana Rodríguez Iglesias (Buenos Aires, 1982). She earned a degree in Arts from the UBA, and is a member of the editorial team of ramona. revista de arte sin imágenes [an art magazine without images], where she coordinated issues 50 and 60, on “Contemporary Poetics.” She produced the Bola de Nieve project for the Telefónica Foundation. She has designed courses specially requested by the Friends’ Assocation of Malba, courses which served as introductions to artists and artistic questions, and been an adjunct instructor on Collecting and the Art Market as part of the Claudio Golombek chair at the UMSA and taken part in an appointment for the chair of Dr. Andrea Giunta at the UBA. In 2013 she was chosen and given a fellowship to participate as a critic and curator in the Artists Program of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. She gives clinics and writing workshops for artists, and has been a practicing curator since 2006.

Karina Granieri (Buenos Aires, 1972). She works in curating exhibitions and meetings, art practices, teaching and construction of space for self-organization. She is an instructor at UNA, at UMSA, and teaches at the Escuela Manuel Belgrano; she is also currently completing a master’s degree in Contemporary Latin American Aesthetics (UNDAV, CIA). She serves as a consultant for private collections, among them the video collection of the Hotel Meliá Recoleta Plaza. From 2009 to 2013 she was an assistant coordinator of LIPAC/Rojas. In 2011 she had a curating residency at Casa M, at the 8th Mercosur Biennial. She was the curator in charge of the gallery of the Center of Brazilian Studies Foundation between 1999 and 2007. In 2006 she received the Argentine Art Critics’ Association prize for curating foreign artists from Portunhol-Portuñol. As an assistant curator she has taken part in the Argentine delegation of the Venice Biennale 49, 2001 and the Seventh Cuenca Biennial, 2002.