Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck, Installation view at Artissima 2013
Artissima is a fair that has taken the idea of the ‘curated’ section and run with it as far as possible. Usually these sections are smaller, discrete add-ons – think of Art Statements at Art Basel or Focus at Frieze. At Artissima however, central stage is given to two sections, ‘Present Future’ and ‘Back to the Future’ each located through the middle of the fair. The face that the fair wants to present is curatorial and the business of catering to local collectors is discretely pushed to the sides.
In ‘Present Future’, a section about emerging artists, Charles Harlan at New York’s JTT and Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck at Dubai’s Green Art stood out.
Balteo-Yazbeck stands at the other end of things, making politically charged work interweaved with visual commentary on the history of modern art. So at Green Art’s stand, a billboard poster work presented a schematic rendering of the delivery capabilities of the Israeli Nuclear Arsenal since 1967 within what looked like a take on hard-edged abstraction.