BEIRUT.- Menasart-Fair (BEIRUT ART FAIR) takes place for the third time at the Beirut International Exhibition Leisure Center (BIEL), under the leadership of Laure d’Hauteville, Pascal Odille and Jean-Marc Decrop, and becomes BEIRUT ART FAIR. Its mission remains unchanged: it is the only modern and contemporary art fair to provide an exchange platform entirely dedicated to artists of the ME.NA.SA. (Middle East, North Africa, South Asia) region.

After a promising opening edition in 2010, the fair brought together in 2011 for its second edition 25 international galleries and proposed a number of cultural exhibitions appreciated by more than 10,000 visitors – collectors, journalists, artists, amateurs and professionals of the art world. “The region ‘ME.NA.SA.’ that stretches from Morocco to Indonesia is booming artistically and economically. In the field of contemporary art, there are 60 museums, 6 biennales, 8 fairs, over 30 foundations, and more than 200 galleries… not to mention the number of emerging artists of high caliber, which we are happy to provide a forum of expression in Beirut at the heart of the “fertile crescent,” states Laure d’Hauteville, the Director of BEIRUT ART FAIR.

“If there is not always a common art to these three regions that are the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, there are ties, common approaches, particularly through artistic practices, such as in the calligraphy, video, and photography, for example. Other artists affirm this notion as witnesses of their time and express through their art the way they perceive the changes that cross the ME.NA.SA. world,” explains Pascal Odille, Expert and Artistic Director of BEIRUT ART FAIR for the Middle East and North Africa.

From the 5 to 8 July 2012, the organizers expect the BIEL to welcome 40 modern and contemporary art galleries representing creations of the ME.NA.SA. region in all its diversity through the practices of painting, drawing, sculpture, video, performance, street art, even some comic strips…The program will also include special engagements among collectors, investors, professionals in the art world with the exhibiting galleries.

Lebanon has always been and will remain the special place for dialogue between cultures, a melting pot where different intellectual currents come together to create a great cultural mosaic,” says Laure d’Hauteville. BEIRUT ART FAIR intends to reaffirm the role of Beirut as the cultural capital of the Arab world and Iran, at the crossroads between East and West.