Supermarket Art Fair 2012

Supermarket 2012, the Stockholm Independent Art Fair since its start 6 years ago has put the foundations for a must-go art venue. Numbers can prove this as this years' participants exceeded the number of 80. Lo and Behold (LAB) was for second year representing Greece. LAB is an artist-run non-profit organization based in Athens, serving as a platform for the production of cultural activities, both in Greece and abroad, with a focus on contemporary art. LaB's objective is to highlight the work of art itself as the outcome of artistic inquiry, rather than as a commercial product.

Their participation in Supermarket Art Fair 2012 was a call for artists to create within the bounds of the urban landscape, and use as an index, the unique nature of an artist’s approach in an environment which is globalized, featuring similar problems and circumstances. The participating artists followed a specific working process both in terms of method and end result. They were asked to imagine and to realize an intervention on a public wall in the city where they lived. Afterwards they were to photograph the intervention and submit it in the form of a poster. These posters were exhibited at Lo and Behold’s booth at Supermarket.

The end result was a patchwork of a number of site-specific works which signified the artists’ varying investigations and concerns and at the same time served as an intervention in the urban environment. An intervention which walks the fine line between legitimacy and illegitimacy, since viewing the art object is not chosen rather it is imposed upon the viewer. Concurrently, the artist is exposed in a way and on a scale in which not just his/her practice is externalized but individual ideas, feelings and attitudes are also freely expressed, following an internal negotiation where the personal is transformed into the public.

{The urban realm, sometimes in a leading role and other times on the sidelines, functioning more as a canvas or as a ‘wall’ on social networking pages, integrates the work into the space and the environment, raising questions which more recently are not just current but crucial.}

In this manner, a record is kept, a visual diary, but also a process of dialogue is activated which exceeds the boundaries of personal investigation.
This dialectic collage is acutely political in that it documents the pulse and the concerns of different artists who, not only reflect the culturally, politically and economically different societies which they are a part of, but in the end are also representative of contemporary art production of their time.

Participating Artists: Bianco - Valente (Italy), Dimitris Christidis (Greece), Common Culture (UK), Guillaume Durand (France), Guerilla Girls (USA), Emma Hammarén (Sweden), Internationale Surplace (France-Germany), Lilli Kinnunen (Finland), Thanos Klonaris (Greece), Stephen Lee (Canada-England), Maria Lianou (Greece), Sanna Marander (Sweden), Eva Marathaki (Greece), Dimitra Marouda (Greece), Tanja Ostojic (Serbia-Germany), Theo Prodromidis (Greece), Luke Ralphs (UK), Erika Rothenberg (USA), Société Réaliste (France), Vasileia Stylianidou (Greece- Germany), Yorgos Taxiarchopoulos (Greece), Magnus Thierfelder (Sweden), Eugenio Tibaldi (Italy), Nikos Tranos (Greece), Andreas Voussouras (Greece).

Curated by Artemis Potamianou, Giorgos Papadatos