Cyprus Mail 14 December 2022
BE OPEN Art, an online art gallery set up by BE OPEN think tank, a humanitarian initiative founded by international entrepreneur and philanthropist Elena Baturina, launches a new competition for emerging artists, aimed to support those whose art best represents their regional, cultural, and ethnic identities – BE OPEN Regional Art.
With the beginning of the year 2023, BE OPEN expert community team will start selecting those artists who best represent the artistic tradition of a certain region to feature in the BE OPEN Art gallery and offer them greater visibility.
Each regional stage will last 3 months, therefore 4 stages will be run for a year, with a winner named for each of them. BE OPEN Art will start with the Eastern Mediterranean region that includes such countries as Cyprus, Turkey, the Greek Dodecanese islands, and the countries of Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Israel, Jordan and Egypt. Next, the focus of the competition will move to the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and Central Africa at the end of the year.
The regional winners will be awarded a money prize of EUR500, while a selection of artwork best representing the region will form an exhibition, in order to share the art with the wide public and celebrate the artists involved. For the first Eastern Mediterranean stage of the competition, the exhibition will presumably take place in Cyprus.
Founder of BE OPEN Elena Baturina said, “We are thrilled to see how many remarkable emerging talents from all over the world have already been or intend to be featured in our BE OPEN Art gallery. And while we do our selections, we realise that in some regions gaining visibility for a young artist is a much harder task than in others. That is why our new trend of work will focus on areas with less developed art markets, to support those artists. BE OPEN Art will facilitate them in getting the attention they deserve and an opportunity to have their say in the art and therefore affect the lives of people who appreciate it. Our first art exhibition will hopefully take place in Cyprus; we look forward to showcasing the amazing art of the Eastern Mediterranean there.”
The regional competition will run along the regular ongoing work of BE OPEN Art, whose experts every month select 20 new artists for the gallery, using online voting to name the Artist of the Month and the Artist of the Year.
Aiming to showcase and support emerging talents, BE OPEN Art selects artists at an early stage of their career who emphasize social consciousness, philosophical meaning and the aesthetical solutions for the wrongs of the contemporary world, such as inequality, lack of diversity, environmental issues, and consumerism. In a way, the project sees its mission as looking for new influencers in the art scene and invites everyone to contribute to this process.
Being featured in BE OPEN Art is an opportunity for emerging artists around the globe to be seen, and a starting point for connections to be built between the new creators and collectors of today. As an online gallery, BE OPEN Art has remained an exciting and highly relevant space for dialogue between the new artists and collectors, who are now, amidst global humanitarian turmoil, are even more inspired to produce and collect socially meaningful art.
