Art Fairs Part Two: Charing Female Waters with Nanna Hjortenberg
By Holly Howe
Nanna Hjortenberg has been Director of CHART art fair since 2018. The Danish fair was founded in 2013 by five Copenhagen-based galleries: Galleri Susanne Ottesen, Andersen’s, Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, David Risley Gallery, and V1 Gallery. Nanna shared with our members how the fair had to rethink its format for 2020 in light of Covid-19 and why they took the radical approach this year to only show female artists at the fair.
The need for a new model
CHART usually takes place in Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen in the last weekend in August, and doesn’t have traditional fair booths but open space exhibitions. They curate the placement of the galleries according to the works they are showing in order to give the best experience for visitors. For the past two years, they have also hosted a design fair, have run a variety of talent programmes for unrepresented artists and designers, and offered a competition for young architects to build a temporary pavilion to house the bars during the fair.
Initially conceived to help create a network between Nordic galleries and the international art market, the fact that the fair is smaller in size than other more established fairs gives them greater agility around what they do. Nanna explained:
“The fact that we are still run by a group of galleries gives us a different approach to [other fairs] and being small means that we are able to constantly innovate and develop in order to get the attention of the international community…we have always tried to expand the art fair format.”
In April the team realised that they would have to rethink their plans for the 2020 fair. They could either cancel the fair altogether, move the date, or come up with something new. They chose the latter and decided to decentralise the fair model so that this year it wouldn’t take place in the single location of Copenhagen but would run across the five Nordic countries in their capital cities – Reykjavík in Iceland, Oslo in Norway, Stockholm in Sweden, Helsinki in Finland, and Copenhagen in Denmark – and that the works would be presented in local galleries.
A key focus was to enable people to keep building relationships and networks in an art scene that has been dramatically disrupted and where people were not able to meet. Nanna elaborated:
“Art is best experienced and shown in real life. We wanted to give local audiences the chance to see the work in the galleries but we also wanted to create a call for action for the local art communities to support the gallery scene. So encouraging curators, museums, institutions, and collectors to shop locally and help restart the art scene.”
The decision to just show female artists
Last year the fair elected that for 2020, the participating galleries would only show women artists with whom they work. The decision was made following reflections on what the fair had achieved in previous years – attracting 25,000 visitors, 40% of whom were international, and having participation from around 90 institutions – and what they could do to improve the fair going forward.
They decided to see how they could develop the art scene in a more proactive way, which
“led us to the focus on women artists and the fact that the gender representation in the art market is what we perceive to be one of the biggest structural challenges on the art scene.”
One significant piece of research was the Art Basel report from last year which “showed that in art fairs internationally, over the past seven years, 24% of the work shown at fairs was produced by women artists. What struck us was that the numbers are not changing despite the fact that there is a better gender balance in most arts schools now.” In addition to this, only 2% of auction sales were of works made by women artists, and even looking from a more local perspective, women artists were only featured in 29% of the solo exhibitions in Danish museums.
Acknowledging that no single force could be responsible for changing these statistics, they decided that hopefully by choosing to just show women artists at CHART in 2020, it could raise greater awareness around the issue and help serve as a role model to others in the art world.
“It came from a desire to try to make change and impact the industry more actively than we normally do. When we started developing the idea we talked to all the galleries that participated and got really strong support from them. A lot of them were [initially] a little bit surprised to be met with a curatorial decision like this and we had a very open dialogues with the galleries and ended at a point where this is a collaborative process.”
It is also possible that the fact that the fair had to change format as a result of the pandemic helped them push this new agenda as Nanna acknowledged that at the moment, “people are more open to new formats and new ways of doing things.”
Dealing with challenges
However, the decision was not without its own challenges The fair had to apply to the Danish Ministry of Culture for an exemption from the Danish law for equality as well as having to reapply for local funding from the City of Copenhagen:
“Our decision had raised some political debate in the council as to whether it is politically allowed to push for a better gender balance in the art scene. These were some of the unexpected challenges that we met. It also points to the fact that it is very hard to change these things.”