Art fairs cancelled in Hong Kong and India

In an increasingly agitated art fair landscape, two recently announced events for next year — Photofairs Hong Kong and Mumbai’s India Art Fair Contemporary — have been shelved. Both are part of the Angus Montgomery Arts network, which earlier this year also pulled the second edition of Photofairs New York, due to run in September. The photography fairs are organised by AMA partner, Creo, though the groups have plenty of overlap (including the same chief executive). The reasons for the three cancellations are “completely separate”, a spokesperson for AMA and Creo says.

Photofairs Hong Kong was due to run on the Central Harbourfront in March 2025, as a satellite event to Art Basel. Now, undefined “recent logistical constraints” mean that the fair won’t take place, despite “great interest and engagement”, a statement says. Organisers are not committing to whether this or the New York fair will run in the future.

In Mumbai, the contemporary version of Delhi’s India Art Fair, due to be in Jio World Garden in November 2025, seems to have proved too much of a clash with Art Mumbai. An IAF statement rules out a second fair format, saying that its expansion will be more about “developing meaningful initiatives in collaboration with key local stakeholders” across India. The 16th edition of IAF, in Delhi February 6-9 2025, will be its largest to date, the statement adds.

The Angus Montgomery Arts portfolio has 10 such events, including Art SG in Singapore, Photo London and Tokyo Gendai, though art fairs in general seem to be having a rollercoaster ride. In October, Frieze’s owners, Endeavor, announced that it had put the art fairs on the market, since its own sale to private equity firm Silver Lake (to complete next year). A Frieze spokesperson did not comment on reports that Endeavor’s current chief executive, Ari Emanuel, was raising funds to buy back some of its assets, including the fairs, and Emanuel did not respond to requests to comment.

A trove of vintage prints by the anti-apartheid photographer Ernest Cole, recently repatriated from Sweden’s Hasselblad Foundation to the artist’s family trust in South Africa, have begun a three-city, selling exhibition in London’s Goodman Gallery (until January 18 2025). 

Cole (1940-90) made the works for his House of Bondage photobook, first published in 1967, the year after the artist fled South Africa — both he and the book were banned in the country. Cole managed to smuggle negatives and prints out, though the circumstances of how they came to be in Sweden are mysterious, to say the least. In 2017, some 60,000 negatives were found in a bank vault and returned to Johannesburg’s Ernest Cole Family Trust while earlier this year, the Hasselblad Foundation handed the trust nearly 500 vintage prints. 

Included in the Goodman Gallery show are works from “The Mines” chapter of Cole’s book, for which he covertly snapped black labourers working and living underground. Another chapter, “Black Ingenuity”, includes images of the avant-garde artists of Cole’s time. This chapter was excluded from the 1967 publication but has been reinserted in Aperture’s updated House of Bondage (2022). The gallery is offering individual photos for between $12,000 and $15,000, with chapters available for up to $70,000 — four have already sold to a South African private foundation, the gallery confirms. Further exhibitions of the works will be at Magnum Gallery in Paris then Goodman Gallery in Cape Town at the start of next year.

Steady sales during Wednesday’s opening day of Art Basel Miami Beach provided some relief to gallerists at the end of an anxious art market year. The overall mood was “buoyant”, said Texas-based Nick Campbell, founder of Campbell Art Advisory, despite “notably fewer people” at the fair’s 22nd edition. “For some of my clients, it was one fair too many this year,” he said. Noah Horowitz, chief executive of Art Basel, concurred that the early hours might have felt quieter, but noted “we have five entrances now, rather than two”, meaning less of a visible crush. He said that the halls of the Miami Beach Convention Center “had the cadence you would want at a serious art fair”.

London gallerist Josh Lilley said that people were more than comfortable to buy works, even when not physically at the fair. He reported sales to collectors in South Korea, Belgium and London of works by Autumn Wallace, Tom Anholt and Celeste Rapone (up to $80,000 each), as well as two ceramic wall pieces by Rebecca Manson to US collectors at the fair ($65,000 each). Other reported sales included some seven-figure sums from galleries including White Cube, Hauser & Wirth, Gladstone and Thaddaeus Ropac, the latter including Elaine Sturtevant’s “Flag after Jasper Johns” (1967) for $1.1mn. Art Basel Miami Beach runs until Sunday.

Miami-based artist Kennedy Yanko, who manipulates found metal and then moulds paint-based “skins” around her sculptures, is gaining market momentum since her 2021 residency in the city’s Rubell Museum. Now, Yanko gets her largest solo exhibition to date through two New York galleries: the uptown Salon 94, which had its first Yanko exhibition in 2021, and the Tribeca space of James Cohan, which began to co-represent the artist this year. Each show will run April 3-May 10 2025. New work will be in each, while the larger Salon 94 will host a mini-retrospective of 15 years of her work as well as dedicating a room to works chosen by Yanko to show her artistic influences, including John Chamberlain and Barbara Chase-Riboud.

The collaboration comes as galleries increasingly team up in a previously more cut-throat market. “There has been a mindshift that is extremely positive,” says David Norr, partner at James Cohan. Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, founder of Salon 94, says “neither of us is a mega gallery, but by joining our forces, it can create the kind of momentum that an artist like [Yanko] deserves.” Sales made will still be split according to the gallery they are in, Rohatyn confirms. Prices range from about $50,000 for “table-top” works, she says, to around $275,000 for Yanko’s larger sculptures. 

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