Menasart-Fair to return as Beirut Art Fair in next year’s event

BEIRUT - Hürriyet Daily News

Menasart-Fair 2012 will be taking place for the third time at the Beirut International Exhibition Leisure Center (BIEL), but will now be known as the Beirut Art Fair, organizers announced today in a press release.

Despite changes to its name, the fair is firm on its intention to follow its past mission, which is to become the only modern and contemporary art fair to provide an exchange platform entirely dedicated to artists of the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia (ME.NA.SA.) region, organizers said.

“Lebanon has always been and will remain the special place for dialogue between cultures, a melting pot where different intellectual currents come together to create a great cultural mosaic,” said festival director Laure d’Hauteville, adding that the Beirut Art Fair intended to reaffirm the role of Beirut as the cultural capital of the Arab world and Iran at the crossroads between East and West.

Kicking off July 5, the organizers expect the four-day fair venue BIEL to welcome 40 modern and contemporary art galleries representing creations from the ME.NA.SA. region in all its diversity through the practices of painting, drawing, sculpture, video, performance, street art and comic strips. The program will also include special engagements among collectors, investors and professionals in the art world.

“The ‘ME.NA.SA.’ region, which stretches from Morocco to Indonesia, is booming artistically and economically. In the field of contemporary art, there are 60 museums, six biennales, eight fairs, over 30 foundations and more than 200 galleries – not to mention the number of emerging artists of high caliber, which we are happy to provide a forum of expression for in Beirut at the heart of the ‘fertile crescent,’” said d’Hauteville.

French art specialist Jean-Marc Decrop is also helping organize the Beirut Art Fair.