Dyala Nusseibeh has always had a head for the arts. Her father, Zaki Nusseibeh, is a cultural adviser to Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the President of the UAE, and has been an adviser and interpreter for the leaders of the country since 1968. As his youngest daughter, she fondly remembers countless childhood road trips around the cultural capitals of Europe including Florence, Rome and Barcelona, and agrees that it probably played a vital role in shaping her future. Last year, she launched ArtInternational, an art fair in Istanbul aimed at harnessing the growing population of art collectors there and in the wider region. The fair’s second edition will open on Friday and it promises to be bigger and better than the first. Establishing an identitIstanbul is no stranger to culture or to art fairs. One of the regional heavyweights in terms of history and a hub for the arts, the city already hosts Contemporary Istanbul, which takes place at a number of venues each November, as well as the slightly smaller Artist-Istanbul, which concentrates on antiques and artifacts. So how did Nusseibeh go about making her fair stand out? “In any big city there are several fairs that happen at the same time, and this is no different,” she says. “We are more or less the first fair to pick up the idea of having a selection committee for the applications to ensure a really high-quality presentation across the fair, and I would say that the main difference is that other fairs are more inclusive of many different levels of galleries.” Three years ago, Montgomery Worldwide, an international group of exhibition-organizing companies, asked Nusseibeh to conduct a research project in Istanbul to assess its viability as a possible market for an international art fair. “The really key thing I found out was that, aside from having incredible history and depth, there was a long tradition of philanthropy,” she says. “Many public art spaces were funded by important Turkish families and there was a lot of patronage for the arts. “The galleries there also have a lot of international artists and Turkish artists were getting a lot of international exposure, and I found that the collectors were really ready to have an international-level fair.” Believing passionately in the project, Nusseibeh took it on and became the fair’s director, launching it last year in the Haliç Congress Center. ArtInternational will feature 80 contemporary art galleries from around the world, including 12 from the host city. All applications were assessed by the ArtInternational Selection Committee, which consisted of the Leila Heller Gallery in New York, Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna, Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris, Pi Artworks in London and Istanbul and Rampa Gallery in Istanbul. The geographical spread represented reaches from San Francisco to Hong Kong and from Helsinki to Jeddah. Several East Asian galleries are attending, including Edouard Malingue and Pearl Lam from Hong Kong, and Lehmann Maupin, which added a Hong Kong location to its New York gallery in 2013. From the region, Assar Art Gallery from Tehran and Athr Gallery from Jeddah are among the participants. “We are more international in terms of how we think about doing the fair and putting it together, but we do have a bit of a regional focus, especially in terms of collectors,” says Nusseibeh. While ArtInternational is still young, Nusseibeh has high hopes for the future. “The key thing that I have learnt with doing fairs is that it is about the group of galleries and the art professionals that you bring together, so on both fronts we are constantly developing and evolving organically,” she says. “We are looking to engage more people in Istanbul and, longer term, I want to bring the fair’s quality up so that it can be one of the best fairs worldwide, which I really believe is achievable.”
