This year’s ARTFEM 2020 is scheduled to open on September 30, having been postponed from its original opening date of March 8 – International Women’s Day – due to the COVID virus situation. The inaugural ARTFEM took place in 2018, bringing together over 140 works from established and emerging artists from the five continents. As a biennial event, this year is only the second edition of the art festival, whose aim is promote the role and influence of women in the world of Art. “We always want to open on March 8, International Women’s Day. We didn’t succeed in doing so this year, yet we didn’t want to postpone the exhibition to the next year,” explains the chairman of the ARTFEM organizing committee and one of the curators of the event, Carlos Marreiros. Marreiros is joined in his curatorial role by other local art figures, Alice Kok, Angela Li Zhenxiang, James Chu and Leonor Veiga. The festival will be held in four separate art spaces in Macau, including Albergue SCM, Former Municipal Cattle Stable, Galeria Lisboa and Casa Garden, with a mix of seminars, workshops and tours.
The participation of 96 artists from all around the world has already been confirmed for this year’s event, with a wide spectrum of artistic expressions focused on this year’s theme of “Nature”. While the first edition of ARTFEM did not have a specific theme, for this year the curatorial team decided to include the Nature theme in order to “create a unified exhibition in which all artists reflected personally about a globally relevant topic – the natural world – and to pay tribute to women’s role in bringing the environment crisis to the foreground,” notes Marreiros in his introduction to the festival. The prominence of the festival is boosted by the inclusion of this year’s two ‘Godmothers’, Beijing sculptor Xiang Jing, and local Macau painter Un Chi Iam, the wife of another renowned local painter, Mio Pang Fei. “Xiang Jing has a brilliant international career,” notes Marreiros. “She creates extremely hyper-real sculptures of women, while objectively debating the issues of women in China and around the world”. And he is also excited about Un Chi Iam’s involvement. “For the first time we have a Godmother from Macau!” he enthuses. Of course, holding a festival in 2020 has presented a number of challenges, but the organisers are determined to make it a success. “Some artists, finding themselves in lockdown, never had the opportunity to finish their works. Others had to remake their works entirely because traveling to Macau SAR was restricted. Making an exhibition at the end of 2020 constitutes an act of resistance and resilience,” concludes Marreiros
