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Power tripStraight to the top

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Beirut Art Fair, for all its hype, tends to be rather maligned by the more critical end of the art world. To be taken seriously, art fairs these days need to be more than temporary department stores selling bits from a list of galleries. They must have debates, screenings, performances, interventions. They are expected to offer an experiential aspect, in keeping with contemporary art and its stimulation-hungry audience. Counterintuitive though it may seem, they are now judged on the quality of their ©

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non-commercial offerings, the key to being considered an interesting proposition for anyone other than collectors.

Beirut Art Fair has done a good job of hosting a collecting event in a difficult country like Lebanon, managing to stimulate the market and bring galleries and collectors from abroad. In previous years, however, it hasn’t introduced much critical depth – something that may change this year with the addition of two

From Paris, with love?By Jasper Toms

Beirut Art Fair ups its game with the help of three French curators

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new curators, Fabrice Bousteau and Silke Schmickl – to the existing credibility of Jerome Sans. Sans is a notable French critic who has worked with influential institutions such as the Palais de Tokyo, and will be curating emerging design at the fair, as he did last year. Bousteau is a French-born Indophile who has curated a mobile art pavilion for Chanel, is currently publishing a text with Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, and most notably curated the exhibition “Paris-Delhi-Bombay” at

the Pompidou Center in 2011. In Beirut he will present a lovely-sounding cabinet of curiosities-style exhibition of Indian artworks around the concept of Dharma. Schmickl, meanwhile, is a Sorbonne-educated film and photography curator from Germany who co-founded the Paris-based film label Lowave; she will curate a series of video works from the region.

This fifth edition of the fair, which takes place at Biel from September 18-

This page An untitled piece by Oussama BaalbakiOpposite page Marwa Adel’s “The Journey-5”

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21, continues its journey of expansion and intellectual development. The event was founded in 2010 by Parisians Laure d’Hauteville and Pascal Odille. For last year’s fourth edition, 46 galleries visited from 14 different countries, exhibiting to a healthy audience of 18,000 people. The four-day happening offers the chance to survey art from the region, with a mix of contemporary works and modern pieces on show that give an approximate image of the saleable art produced in the Levant and its surroundings over the past half-century or so.

Some headline aspects of the fair, however, remain problematic. For example, the remit of covering the entire MENASA region – the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia – is an impossible task that smacks of ©

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“Oriental Dancer” by Jean Paul Guiragossian (left) and “A Vista d’Occhio” by Moje Assefjah (right)

the sort of unreconstructed colonialistic framework that no attempt at meaningful curation is likely to rectify. This chimes unfortunately with the fact that the shape of the fair is defined entirely from a French point of view, with only token integration of local curation and orchestration. While the involvement of additional curators this year is admirable, that they are also Parisian in education and perspective may sit uncomfortably as people ask why curators from the Middle East’s blooming art scene are not contributing.

The aim of showing artists who are “inspired by their heritage and their history turmoil, creating their art work away from the globalization buzz, fashion trends and the star system” may be laudable but also a touch romantic, considering that Beirut is far from off the map, and sits at the nexus of a hotly buzzing global network where hyper-connected transcultural influences are both produced and absorbed. But not all art fairs can do everything at once, and in Beirut, staging an event of this scale in an efficient manner is a feat in itself. Having cracked that now, hopefully this year’s offerings from Bousteau and Schmickl will add an interesting layer to this buzz point in Beirut‘s burgeoning art calendar.

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