FAQ NET: Part V

FAQ NET: It is the name of the new column that we start as Media Partners on a regular basis of Platforms Project-Independent Art Fair, asking a common question to participating artists – representatives of artistic groups and collectives, resulting from the needs of conteporary reality and the changes that have already occurred after the Covid 19 Pandemic and the Global Lockdown; with Platforms Project-Independent Art Fair to pioneer in the European Art Fair space and to transfer the entire fair online at Platforms Project Net 2020 (14-31/5/2020).

By Efi Michalarou & Dimitris Lempesis

How do you feel participating in an online Art Fair like Platforms Project 2020? A new experience that emerged through the needs of Covid 19 World Pandemic fighting. What are the new challenges and what do you expect from this participation?

Costas Vittis (ArtCode Platform): Every single participation of ours as visual artists, in an international art fair, and in fact in such one like the Platforms Project, created for independent artists, who have shaped and joined several platforms, in order to express and share ideas together, this factor itself is indeed a very significant and a rather special event.
It stigmatizes our artistic route and urges us to co-operate together with fellow colleagues and curators, whilst the coexistence of our ideas and philosophical pursuits, with those of the fellow artists, are often freed from our egocentric rationale and promoted to more substantial and dynamic ideas and statements.
The whole annual artistic preparation inspires and encourages us in a quite fruitful procedure. The last-minute and however necessary cancellation of the event, in combination with the recent unprecedented international circumstances, would eventually bring on a certain broaden disappointment for all the participating artists.
Despite the fact that the actual event is postponed, just like the rest of the international events in every other sector did due to the demanding conditions, the unexpected and rapid transformation of the exhibition into a digital one, and its viral recognition in the social media, and in addition to the simultaneous encouragement for a direct participation, gave us all hope and enriched us with an incredible optimism, while it gave us the drive to consciously realize the decisive effect the team dynamic might have.
The announcement of the Platforms Project 2020 to introduce itself to a broad audience via the digital exhibition motivates us towards a different structure of thought. The awareness of the power of a digital exhibition, and its ability to reach a much wider audience, and furthermore the enormous possibility given to every artist to connect and communicate with other artists, curators, galleries and art collectors from all around the globe, finally pushes us artists to actively handle the digital landscape with a more effective way. This factor itself creates the fundamentals of new contemporary methods of presentation, promotion and selling works of art.

Kees Koomen (EX-MÊKH): The online Art Fair came about because of the crisis and had to be put together in a short period of time. EX-MÊKH had planned a project with participation of the public, but now that there is no public to participate with directly we changed our plan. Within a week we decided to comment on the situation in a video, making use of our practice in the Malieveld Project in Den Haag (https://sites.google.com/site/malieveld5).We planned an exhibition in a public space, the Malieveld in Den Haag, with performances and installations. About it we would make a video and send that to Artemis as our tribute to the fair. The result is a Buster Keaton – like video in which artists try to set up an exhibition which seems to fail, but somehow it shows the experience of trial and error artists and curators know from their practice.
We found the challenge in the required improvisation and in the idea of showing a direct reaction on the situation of artists in the world right now in the medium that somehow solves a lot of problems these days . Working with online exhibitions is new to us and we are looking forward to the moment the fair is online.
We expect the fair to have a lot of attention, as always, and we also expect more visibility than in the normal fair. All participants will activate their network so attention will be global. I am curieus about the views on the fair in general and on our booth in particular. Personally I am also participating in three other online artprojects and I expect the artworld to move increasingly in this direction as other elements in society will do. The chance to be part of a big on-line project like this is of course great. I hope there will be a lot of reactions from the public in general. We already benefited from our participation at Platforms project by doïng projects with other platforms and maybe we can make new acquaintances to work with and arouse interest with curators and galleries