ATHENS, GREECE.- Organizing efforts for the 12 th edition of art athina-contemporary art fair, planned to take place in May, are steadily marching toward completion, with the fair's official opening scheduled for Friday, 20 th May.

Having reached its twelfth edition, art athina-contemporary art fair has proven that collective vision and co-operation may create the necessary conditions for the expansion and improvement of the contemporary art scene on the national as well as international levels. Accomplishing its primary aim through a twelve-year course, art athina has managed to bring contemporary art closer to a wider public, at the same time promoting dialogue with the international art world.

The event continues to contribute to the showcasing of a wide range of trends in contemporary art , as it involves participation of 43 art spaces from Greece , Cyprus , Belgium , France , Germany , Denmark , Great Britain and the USA, which make up the fair's central core.

At the same time , art athina has already from its first edition offered Greek art lovers and foreign visitors alike the possibility to become acquainted with contemporary art developments in other European countries , through exhibitions dedicated to the particular art production of those countries.

This year's fair opens a new cycle of investigations as it presents the exhibition C Aof works by artists living and working in California. The project's originality lies in the fact that the works to be featured belong to Greek collections of contemporary art such as Ioannis Christoforakos, H. David, T. Gigourtakis, D. Joannou, G. Papadimitriou, K. Papageorgiou, D. Passas and Zacharias Portalakis. The exhibition is to be curated by independent art critic Max Henry. In his essay, the curator states: " The exhibition C A shows a time flow of contemporary art within four generations of artists that have shown since the 1960's up to 2005. Sculpture and video take on contemporary plasticity while painting and design inventively uphold the traditional. The works themselves take on multiple perspectives from the viewpoint of different age groups. Holding up individually each artist none-the-less gain another dimension as a dissonant grouping and veer from the visceral or absurd, to the intangible. The analog generation then meets the digital generation in a dialogue that resonates with recent and current history ".

In a specially arranged space the fair will be presenting yet one more event dedicated to video art, namely the LOUD & CLEAR project produced by the BIFRONS Foundation, Amsterdam, in co-operation with the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. LOUD & CLEAR is an interactive video art project involving participation of nine acclaimed artists: John M . Armleder , Pierre Bismuth , Marlene Dumas , Pierre Huyghe , Yayoi Kusama , Aernout Mik , Pipilotti Rist , Viktor & Rolf and Gillian Wearing , as well as nine music composers. Its innovative character consists in participation, in terms of the project's semiotics and creative aspect, of nine marketing executives, who create a new work taking as a starting point the project's original artwork, while soundtrack remains the same. The project's multidimensional character is indeed one of the objectives of the BIFRONS Foundation, which is supported by state and private institutions in the Netherlands, Great Britain and Switzerland.

art athina inaugurates this year a new co-operation with BACARDI HELLAS, whose BOMBAY SAPPHIRE becomes the fair's main sponsor.