LONDON.- London Art Fair has today announced a series of collaborations between emerging UK and international galleries for ‘Dialogues’, a section of Art Projects guest-curated by Natasha Hoare, which aims to encourage and foster relationships between galleries on a global scale.

The Fair also previews highlights of the large-scale installations, solo shows and thematic group displays that will be shown by galleries exhibiting in Art Projects as well as a new partnership with Furtherfield, bridging art and technology, that will invite visitors to play, debate and contribute ideas to a collaborative artwork combining platform gaming and drawing.

Curated by Natasha Hoare, ‘Dialogues’ returns to London Art Fair, following two highly successful editions. Natasha is Associate Curator at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam. She is also completing work on ‘Curating Now’, a book of interviews with international curators to be published by Laurence King in 2015.

The five 2016 ‘Dialogues’ collaborations are:

• Copperfield (London) / NEST (The Hague)
• Division of Labour (Worcester) / NOME (Berlin)
• l’étrangère (London) / Base-Alpha Gallery (Antwerp)
• The RYDER (London)/ All Together Now (Rotterdam)
• TJ Boulting (London) / Leslie (Berlin)

Natasha Hoare comments: “Dialogues is a project that enables collaborative presentations by commercial galleries in the setting of London Art Fair. Pairing international spaces with UK based galleries, we hope to exploit the trappings of working across geographical divides, with all the attendant creative leaps and productive mistranslations. British artists will be brought together across stands in both assonance and juxtaposition, shown alongside practitioners based in The Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and further afield to expand existing networks of artistic exchange and influence, and to forge new ones.”

Art Projects has established itself as an important international platform for galleries to showcase the most stimulating contemporary practice, and continues to garner widespread critical acclaim.

Galleries participating in Art Projects for the first time include BAC Gallery (Colombia), GALERIE bart (The Netherlands), Matèria (Italy) and London-based Iniva, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Ncontemporary, New Art Projects and White Conduit Projects.

WW Contemporary London will present a large-scale text-based sculpture from 2015 SOLO Award winner Korean artist Kyung Hwa Shon, which explores the reciprocal relation between a city and the imagination through the eyes of a city phantom, ‘Stillman’. The work will comprise of texts stencilled on copper sheets.

Video highlights include Open Gallery (London), which will present Jasmina Metwaly’s ‘Remarks on Medan’, a series of 12 video paintings filmed in 2011 capturing Tahrir Square, Egypt – famously associated with that year’s Egyptian Revolution. Metwaly’s work was also recently exhibited as part of the German Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Rome-based contemporary art gallery Matèria will present the first UK solo show by represented Italian artist Giulia Marchi, which continues the artist’s exploration of the linkages shared by images and text, literature and photography.

As part of its new partnership with London Art Fair, Furtherfield will present ‘PLAY ART DATA MONEY’, a collaborative artwork devised to build a collective vision of the future art world economy, combining drawing and platform gaming. Taking place in the Screening Room in Art Projects, the initiative invites artists, collectors, curators, funders, critics and Fair-goers to join a game-jam and play a new game launched at the Fair. ‘PLAY ART DATA MONEY’ forms part of Furtherfield’s three-year ‘Art Data Money’ programme, inviting people to take the creative challenge to discover new ways for cryptocurrencies and big data to benefit us all.

Art Projects will also present interactive, performance-based installation. Alongside Brazilian artist Eduardo Padilha, Iniva will present a performance programme from Ghanaian artist Harold Offeh. ‘Choreograph Me’, originally commissioned by mima, Middlesbrough, invites audiences to develop a series of instructions for Offeh to perform. Over the period of an hour, Offeh will perform the instructions which will form a collectively choreographed piece, questioning how an artist can be used as a sculptural material and his labour be made useful to an audience.

Other Art Projects highlights include the launch of the XL Catlin Art Guide 2016, featuring profiles of 30 of the most exceptional new graduate artists selected from UK art schools by curator Justin Hammond. A limited number of books will be available for free at the Fair alongside an exhibition of work by selected artists, including Riikka Hyvonen’s series of paintings from ‘Roller Derby Kisses’, which depict the bruised bottoms of roller derby girls. The XL Catlin Art Prize will celebrate its tenth year at London Art Fair 2016, showcasing the most promising art school graduates one year on from their degree exhibitions, selected from the XL Catlin Art Guide.

De’Longhi is sponsoring this year’s Art Projects Artist Award. One artist exhibiting in Art Projects will receive a cash prize of £2,500, assessed on the merit of their art practice and work on display at the Fair. The winner will be selected by a judging panel involving key art world figures from the areas of collecting, journalism, curating and education, announced at the Fair during the Preview Evening on Tuesday 19 January.

Neal Jones, UK and Ireland Country Manager, De’Longhi, comments, “De’Longhi is proud to be supporting the Art Projects Artist Award at London Art Fair 2016. We pride ourselves on innovative, modern design and we’re privileged to be able to reward an emerging contemporary artist and support their work as they develop their exciting career in the art world.”

London Art Fair 2016 stays open to the public until 9pm on 21 January for Thursday Late in association with Peroni Nastro Azzurro, when Fair visitors can enjoy complimentary drinks and sample specially-designed infusions at a pop-up House of Peroni bar, as well as a programme of talks, tours and performances.