Art Fair was a project produced for the annual Autumn Exhibition at the Copenhagen exhibitionspace Charlottenborg The arrangement took place in the courtyard in front of the building on the day of the opening.
The participating artists had been invited through an ad in Politiken – a Copenhagen daily paper – under the heading “Open invitation to the Charlottenborg Autumn Exhibition”. To reflect different areas, the participants were divided into four groups; art-students, amateurs, institutionally educated artists and autodidacts. The courtyard held 30 stands that were distributed to the participants in the order that they reported their interest, for as long as there were still room within the relevant cathegory. No other criteria determined the final constitution of the art fair. Each participant was alotted a number of stickers with the logotype of the Autumn Exhibition, to be attached to the sold art-works as an officially acknowledged guarantee of their artistic value.
The project was partly a comment on the status that this particular exhibition has on the Copenhagen art-scene, and partly an attempt to, in a democratic way, give “everybody” a chance to benefit from the advantages of having the Charlottenborg Autumn Exhibition on their CV. As it turned out, it also came to provide a festive supplement or an alternative to the exhibition taking place indoors. After the day of the opening, the piece was represented by a photo-documentation of the event in the entrance-hall of the exhibition space.
Produced in cooperation with Charlottenborg Exhibitionspace and with the participants of the art fair.
