Arterritory.com is a website is an art and culture website in Latvian, Russian, and English, which focuses on Baltic, Scandinavian, and Russian art and its manifestations elsewhere in the world.
Arterritory.com was created by a highly motivated group of people convinced that art is an open world, one that provides a place not only for professionals, but also for connoisseurs and lovers of art. People behind Arterritory.com are passionate professionals in the fields of culture and journalism. Each of them has his or her own list of favourites in art; they often have cardinally different opinions, and come with their own baggage of experience.
Arterritory.com describes itself as a territorial art portal paying attention to the art of this particular region and how it is represented elsewhere in the World. Common to these territories is their geographical position often referred to as „Northern Europe”. The Baltic States (and also Finland) have always been in close mutual interaction with the neighbouring Russia. Mutual interaction is characteristic to these territories from both historical and current perspective. This explains arterritory.com’s particular regional focus, why the creators decided to include all Scandinavian countries but not Poland for example.
At the same time arterritory.com helps to connect Baltic and Scandinavian art to a wider European art market. Baltic art has a lot in common with its other Northern European neighbours. First and foremost it shares a common mentality. However, this aspect cannot be attributed to Russia, which has common historical and cultural background with the Baltic States. We cannot also dismiss the fact that a significant number of the founders of the Baltic professional culture were educated in the tsarist Russia.
Northern Europe is physically situated away from the big epicentres of art in the World therefore it needs to promote itself; others seldom pay enough attention to the region’s art. Daiga Rudzate, Creative Director of Arterritory.com, thinks that this project helps to understand what is taking place in the Russian art scene; however it does not aim at integrating somebody into something.
Artterritory.com was founded two and a half years ago. One of the biggest successes of project so far were the two printed Arterritory journals in Latvian, English and Russian encompassing conversations with such distinguished pillars of contemporary art scene as Hans Ulrich Obrist, Luc Tuymans, Andrew Renton, Robert Wilson, Erlend Loe, Viktor Misiano, Jan Fabre, Maria Lind and others.
For more information please see http://www.arterritory.com/en/
This story is based on an interview with the project’s creative director Daiga Rudzate.
Like this: