A Global Showcase

A Global Showcase

Celebrating talented new visionaries from the UK and around the world, START Art Fair returns to London’s Saatchi Gallery for its fifth edition. A platform for emerging trends, the event highlights young galleries and art scenes from across the globe whilst addressing diversity from a variety of perspectives.

Featured exhibitors include pop-up London venue Open Doors Gallery (OD). The space aims to highlight photographic works by emerging artists such as Arnaud Montagrad, Guy Bolongaro and Monty Kaplan, whose work is featured here.

Kaplan’s cinematic imagery – part of Aesthetica‘s New Artists scheme – offers a window into suburbia, capturing everyday happenings through an engagement with colour and shadow. Evoking a sense of mystery, each interior space lies dormant and devoid of human presence, whilst the outside world remains drenched in an enigmatic neon glow. He reflects: “I am very interested in the world that people have built, and in the objects and infrastructures we create. My work is a kind of surreal anthropological documentation of the human world.”

In a similar way, social worker Guy Bolongaro records the unusual and vibrant in his daily surroundings, offering a unique vision of local neighbourhoods. An external gaze is key to Bolongaro’s documentary work, which also uses light in visually intriguing ways.

By showcasing such artists, OD encourages community cohesion, and its open submissions foster a sense of local and personal pride. Looking to the future of the image-making, it hosts innovative works on Instagram, providing a new, widely-accessible model.

Many of START’s exhibitors address issues of representation through dedicated shows. For example, Balart offers opportunities to Hungarian, Slovak and Czech practitioners, whilst Akroyd Art foregrounds contemporary Burmese artists. The Gallery of Everything is committed to the advancement, integration and celebration of those beyond the cultural mainstream.

Demonstrating the fair’s global reach, START’s 2018 Projects presentation Resolution District highlights forward-thinking and pioneering young contemporaries from China. Looking to art into the information age, China Academy of Art’s Yan Wang explains: “The exhibition looks at the power of video and image, and the installations explore the digital and self-media age, the mobility of images, the image-borne poetry in works of young generations and the social status quo and problems these artists intend to express.”

From 13-16 September. Find out more here.

Credits:
1. Monty Kaplan, Lay Chill Repeat, 2017.
2. Guy Bolongaro, Dark End of the Street 3, 2017
3. Monty Kaplan, Brooklyn Window, 2017.