TWO EVENINGS before the vernissage of the thirteenth edition of the moving-image fair Loop, I strolled down the streets of sunny Barcelona toward the galleries for the soft launch to the week’s festivities. At ProjecteSD, crowds had gathered for the opening of “Close-Cropped Tales,” and I grabbed an Estrella beer and talked to gallery founder Silvia Dauder and curator Anne-Laure Chamboissier about the constraints of collecting and storing video art. “Imagine what it’s like for sound!” said Conrado Uribe, the artistic director of the citywide festival, also called Loop, that runs parallel to the fair. The collecting conversation haunted us everywhere we went. “And then there are the copyright issues,” said veteran collector Michael A. Meer as we waited for lunch the next day at Flax&Kale, a vegetarian restaurant hosting the warm-up lunch organized by the fair. “It is good that they pushed through the economic crisis, and although you could tell there was less money, the art was always great.” A guest pulled a face at the watermelon and goat cheese combo in front of her, but most collectors, artists, and art professionals polished off their pumpkin raviolis and tuna burgers and reunited over chia-seed pudding. Loop appears to be the rendezvous for video aficionados: “Europe is the most progressive place for collecting video,” said dealer Emilio Álvarez, who cofounded the fair in 2003 with Carlos Duran.
Later that afternoon at the MACBA, curator Hiuwai Chu introduced two videos on show, Cabaret Crusades: The Path to Cairo by Wael Shawky and Garden Conversation by Bouchra Khalili, as well as Iman Issa’s sculptures Heritage Studies, while at the La Virreina Image Centre, the curator of Lisbon’s Fundação Leal Rios showed select works from their collection in the cavernous space he was allocated under the impressive rooms hosting Sophie Calle’s retrospective. Some of us left to look amid the oyster stalls, fruits, and iberico hams in the boqueria for Antoni Miralda’s TV stall showing his works along with those of Malia Jensen, Teresa Serrano, Shahar Marcus, and Nezaket Ekici, part of his Food Cultura satellite project. “I really like this kind of proposition,” smiled collector and artist Laurent Fiévet, whose intervention at the Museu Picasso I later discovered on a video-scouting run around town with PMQ’s William To. A superimposition of scenes from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Velazquez’s Las Meninas, Fiévet’s Carlotta’s Way series made for likable propositions of their own.
Early that evening the crowds convened inside the exclusive English-style club Círculo del Liceo to see video works by Francis Alÿs, Emily Jacir, and Bruce Nauman, among others, and to partake in the talk between curator Carles Guerra and collectors Emilio Pi and Helena Fernandino. “We have fourteen screens at home. When they aren’t running it looks like a TV shop,” said Fernandino, adding that they can’t help it when watching movies to spot sequences “that would make great videos!”—marking successive hits with the audience.
As the fair opened the next day at the Hotel Catalunya, the forty-five invited galleries—one video per room—created quite a stir in the corridors, forcing some doors to close to retain the feel of a dark oasis. Video, as a medium, unfolded in all its versatility, from painterly poetry in Sophia Pompery’s Still water, a water painting that reveals a mirror image before drying, to experimentations in Claudia Larcher’s Self, a morphing close-up of body-skin tissue, and movement, as in Michal Helfman’s %, a choreography as a musical canon. There was plenty of formal diversity, and although there were no commissions, many works had their premieres at Loop. “Good legs,” chuckled a viewer about a spy dressed as a woman in Juul Hondius’s Brilliant Punitive Raids, a photo-essay based on the 1988 assassination of Abu Jihad in Tunis.
More evidence of the fair’s conviviality was found during the many talks held in the hotel restaurant and the conference room. “I like sharing, otherwise I wouldn’t buy editioned works,” said Turkish collector Agah Ugur during his conversation with CollectorSpace founder Haro Cumbusyan. Friday night peaked with a spirit of camaraderie during the Discovery Awards, organized at the Estrella Damm Antigua Fábrica, a former brewery. “I hope they have wine,” joked a guest before uncovering six different kinds of beer, Spanish omelettes, and pizzas. After four days of doing like the fairgoers—i.e., purposefully inquiring about new artists, conscientiously catching up on established ones, and avidly sitting through every screening (yes, Loopers actually sit through entire videos)—I decided to retire early, jumping in a taxi with blinkvideo.de’s Julia Soekeland. Summing up the industry, she called attention to the strange contrast between different models of funding and distribution for moving-image works—galleries’ limited editions versus festival screening fees. “Just remember that there used to be a time when galleries sold signed DVDs!”
