Biennials

Der Text analysiert paradoxe Aspekte der Biennalen, die sie sowohl als künstlerisch-gesellschaftliches Medium, als Arena von Repräsentation und als Experimentierfeld für das Zusammenleben ausmachen. Vorkommnisse der 31. Biennale von São Paulo und solche auf früheren Biennalen werden hier mit einbezogen, um Parallelen aufzuzeigen und die nachwirkenden Effekte von Differenzen und Wiederholungen zu untersuchen.
Unterschiedliche Gesichtspunkte bezüglich Publikum, KunstkritikerInnen, KuratorInnen, Künstlerinnen,VermittlerInnen, Institutionen etc. werden dargelegt und einander gegenüber gestellt. Weitere Fragen nach den Bedingungen eines aktiv an der Biennale teilnehmenden Publikums ergeben sich aus diesen unterschiedlichen Blickwinkeln und werden von Begriffen Jacques Rancières untermauert.

A critical, comparative analysis of the exhibition project Utopia Station, mounted by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Molly Nesbit, and Rirkrit Tiravanija at the 2003 Venice Biennale, against Hardt and Negri's 2000 treatise, Empire. This essay was written in 2006 and originally published online in the journal PART (no. 12, 2007), which is now defunct as far as I can tell. I wrote this piece in my first year of grad school, but it has been cited by a number of scholars so I share it here in case it may be of further use to others.

Aperto 80 lanciò a livello internazionale gli artisti della transavanguardia italiana e segnò l’inizio del successo commerciale della pittura neoespressionista e dello star system. Eppure non doveva essere una mostra di giovani e tantomeno doveva essere ripetuta. La canonizzazione del format giovani under 40, si articolò lungo un arco temporale piuttosto esteso, dimostrando, Aperto dopo Aperto che ‘i giovani’ erano la categoria trainante dell’arte contemporanea internazionale.
Le ultime edizioni fino al 1993 furono memorabili. Tra scandali e polemiche si affacciarono in laguna i protagonisti della scena artistica dell’ultimo decennio del secolo - da Dan Cameron a Nicolas Bourriaud, da Lorna Simpson a Damien Hirst - confermando la fama di una mostra che sembrava capace di indicare la direzione delle tendenze artistiche a venire.
Al suo apice Aperto venne interrotto, anche se la sua influenza arrivò fino alla soglia del nuovo millennio quando Harald Szeemann decise di incorporarne il metodo nella sua Biennale del 1999 che intitolò dAPERTutto.

The storytelling of Futurists in Venice Biennale, topic of the first exhibition organized for the 52 Art Biennial after the renovation of Palazzo Giustinian.

La storia del Futurismo alla Biennale di Venezia non è mai stata scritta. Macchina di Visione. Futuristi in Biennale è un progetto che esplora i meccanismi di regia della Biennale di Venezia, e le ragioni della sua governance, attraverso l'analisi diacronica della partecipazione di artisti, idee e opere futuriste al Salone Internazionale. Nell'anno in cui si celebra il centenario del primo manifesto e in occasione della 53. Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte, la Biennale coglie l'opportunità di presentarsi al pubblico come ente che ha progressivamente costruito la fortuna critica del movimento. Lo fa con una mostra princeps a Ca' Giustinian, nella rinnovata sede istituzionale della Biennale. Giacimento di questa mostra sono lettere, prefazioni ai cataloghi, manifesti, fotografie, filmati, nastri audio e oggetti di arredo che attestano la presenza del Futurismo alla manifestazione veneziana. Un lungo excursus, dal 1910 al 1995, svela il ruolo giocato dalla Biennale nell'accoglienza, nella sollecitazione e nella promozione del pensiero futurista. E illustra forme e risultati di un dialogo ora polemico ora conciliante, comunque cruciale per comprendere le politiche sui valori e i gusti del Salone. Segno che la ricerca sul più importante gruppo di avanguardia in Italia non si è affatto esaurita. È invece un lascito leggibile - e in maniera sorprendente - nella trama di alcune pratiche, dentro fenomeni di ritualità, negli accenti di consenso e di dissenso espressi verso e dalla controparte Biennale. Lo studio-catalogo offre elementi di teoria a partire dalla disamina concreta dei documenti, permettendo di dire che l'eredità culturale non si trasmette, si conquista.

Biennials, as a new ephemeral spatiality of display, inhabit spaces and exhibits spaces in a temporal presence that have a seminal textuality. Through time, the concept and space of biennials are pluralized and heterogenized, reflecting the transformation of the art and architecture. Especially since 1990s, they have proliferated in number and involvement, function of exhibition expanded to mind-shifting discursive acts and theoretical knowledge production, as its space leaked from the neutrality of 'the white cube' and expanded to each fragment of city space. Since biennial phenomenon is a new research field, its relations are in a process of discovery and expansion. As they refer to a new kind of space formation, the aim of this paper is to reframe and discuss the concept of biennials (large-scale exhibitions), within their temporal, textual and spatial resonances. The analogy of 'interface' is the main narration and comparison agent in this paper, in order to reframe the space of the biennial with its dual extrusions of time, text and space.

This paper focuses on the role of contemporary art in international relations and world politics. In IR, art is often examined within the framework of cultural diplomacy, country branding, and soft power, or approached as a site of resistance. We argue that the concept of heteronomy offers an alternative conceptual framework for analysing contemporary art in world politics. It highlights the interaction of various fields such as art, commerce, the state and media. We concretise this approach with an analysis of the Venice Biennale. We show that the Biennale is heteronomous in the sense of being an arena where actors from various fields struggle for power by accumulating different types of capital. We focus our analysis on the Russian national pavilion in 2011–2015 and show how the efforts of the country’s elite to legitimise its position are intertwined with the projects of the state, sponsors, artists, curators and art market actors.

The 57th edition of the Venice Biennale opened on Saturday 13 May 2017. For an International Relations scholar, the Biennale offers an opportunity to explore the structures of the art world and observe the dynamics between different kinds of actors.

The number of contemporary art biennials has increased significantly over the last 25 years giving rise to the phenomenon of biennalization of contemporary art. In this article, we detail the world politics of biennalization through a review of mainly academic literature on biennials. We analyze internal definitions within the reviewed material through three dimensions: scale, politics, and production of value (political economies). Our analysis shows the world politics of biennials revolves around a set of productive tensions between the order of nation states and its alternatives, cultural dominance and resistance, and various modes of value production.

This is the second chapter of the book "Just Another Exhibition. Histories and Politics of Biennials" (Postemdiabooks, Milano 2011 co-authored with F. Martini). The book intends to set the biennials within the framework of the history of exhibitions, in order to observe the transformations of recent curatorial practice in relation to the issue of internationality and national representation. The second chapter examines the 1976 Biennale, as a point of rupture in the history of the Venice Biennale, since it marks the beginning of theme-based exhibitions as a solution to the fragmented exhibition space brought about by national pavilions.

The City in the Biennale: Architecture, geography and identity


Nicola Foster and Joel Robinson, The Open University, n.foster@open.ac.uk    joel.robinson@open.ac.uk

Biennials and other large-scale recurring art expositions now occur in major cities and regional areas across the world. This session explores the centrality of the city to biennials and their ‘festivalisation’ of art. We are interested in the relationship between the ‘heterotopia’ of such events and the city (concrete or imaginary) to which they are attached. These ‘mega events’ are endowed – financially and otherwise – with the potential to re-image and re-make the city, changing its identity. Such mega-exhibitions are of course bound up with a politics of place-branding for financial investment, real-estate speculation, regeneration and gentrification, as well as attracting local and global tourism. Dismissing such events as a cultural arm of neoliberalism, however, may discount the new identities and opportunities that they configure.
This session aims to open the debate on ‘the city in the biennale’: the role of the city and the architectural spaces used and/or constructed in the organisation of such events, as well as the engagement with those spaces in the work of participating artists, curators and the public. To what extent have recent biennials followed on or departed from models like Venice or São Paulo? What facilities are used, adapted or newly built to accommodate displays and the circulation of visitors? What kind of architecture drives the spectacle? What dynamics of exclusivity or inclusivity are designed into the geography of such events? We welcome contributions from art historians, anthropologists, urbanists, curators and artists, and are particularly interested in case-studies from the emerging economies of Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America.

O artigo investiga a Pesquisa de Inclinação Política feita pelo Artista, uma das linhas poéticas que foram desenvolvidas pela 32ª Bienal de São Paulo, “Incerteza Viva”. A Pesquisa em Arte é uma imagem para a Arte de Agora, sendo desenvolvida em universidades ou de forma independente e exibida e discursada em exposições. Artistas como Jorge Menna Barreto, Maria Thereza Alves, Ruth Ewan e Hito Steyerl trazem o modo de fazer da Pesquisa em Arte para dentro de seus projetos poéticos. Em muitos casos, esse modo acontece a partir da instalação, no projeto poético, de um campo de debates políticos atuais: questões ecológicas, raciais, de gênero, de imigração, de crítica ao mercado da arte etc., mas, sobretudo, acerca dos impasses político-econômicos recentes. - Palavras-chave: Pesquisa em arte; pesquisa artística; arte política; 32ª Bienal de São Paulo; arte brasileira de agora.
*
This article investigates the Research of Political Inclination made by the Artist, one of the poetic lines that was developed by the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, "Incerteza Viva"("Uncertainty Live"). The research in Art is an image for the Art of Now, which can be developed in universities or independently, and can be also exhibited and discussed in exhibitions. Artists such as Jorge Menna Barreto, Maria Thereza Alves, Ruth Ewan and Hito Steyerl bring the way of doing of Art Research into their own poetic projects. In many cases, this way is done with the installation of, in the poetic project, a field of current political debates: ecological issues, racial, gender, immigration, criticism of the art market etc., but, above all, about the recent political-economic impasses. - Keywords: Research-based art; artistic research; political art; 32nd Bienal de São Paulo; Brazilian contemporary art.

L’obiettivo di questo testo è lo studio dell’edizione online della Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento di Buenos Aires, una manifestazione artistica che ha visto sconvolta la propria attività durante la diffusione dell’epidemia da SARS- CoV-2. Sebbene una dimensione non in presenza coincida oggi sempre più frequentemente con la fruizione di opere d’arte, la diffusione online di biennali e mostre ha reso ancora più urgente la riflessione sulle forme espositive e sulle condizioni della spettatorialità. Nello specifico il testo analizza la piattaforma web progettata e curata per l’edizione online della Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento: mirarnos a los ojos (volver a). Di fronte alla smaterializzazione del significante artistico imposto dall’emergenza sanitaria, la piattaforma costruisce una spazialità virtuale dove tornare a guardarsi negli occhi. Attraverso una riflessione sui meccanismi di interfacciamento e sulle possibilità di interazione offerte dai linguaggi digitali, mirarnos a los ojos (volver a) declina modalità comunicative tipiche dei mezzi di comunicazione con modalità comunicative tipiche dell’interazione faccia a faccia. Traduzione digitale delle interdipendenze emerse durante l’emergenza sanitaria, mirarnos a los ojos (volver a) è un progetto al quale hanno partecipato 70 artiste/i invitate/i a occupare una spazio-temporalità audiovisiva mappata da quattro coordinate cronotopiche con cui costruire una trama collettiva dell’esperienza del confinamento.

Shortly before the demise of the worldwide Occupy movement, two watershed events mark its final transformation. Two collaborations with international art exhibitions in Germany, that not only changed the fate of the movment, but brought up deep contradictions concerning protest as a form of art. The essay scrutinizes these transformations and critically assesses the activist’s goals and the ramifications of their artistic practices.

Using the term parafiction to name situations in which a fiction is temporarily experienced as fact, this essay examines the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of contemporary art  that puts viewers through such experiences. Why has this kind of art become so common?  Works by Walid Raad, Michael Blum, the Yes Men and others. Sometimes funny, frequently moving, and arguably cruel, parafiction exemplifies art's culture-shifting power, pushing alternatives from the possible to the plausible. (N.B. I now start discussions of this geneaology in the early 1990s, finding in the work of Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Andrea Fraser, Fred Wilson and others a model of epistemological critique).

본 연구는 동시대 사회와 현대미술이 글로벌리즘 아래 상호작용하며 변화해온 점에 주목해 현대미술의 미학적 경향을 분석한다. 현대미술은 1990년 이후로 형식부터 내용까지 변모를 거듭해왔다. 그 변화 한가운데 비엔날레가 현대 미술계의 가장 우세하고 영향력 있는 전시 형식이자 미술제도라는 사실에 비춰, 우리는 ‘비엔날레 문화’라 불리는 동시대 미술 현상에 초점을 맞춘다. 그리고 ‘유동성’ 개념을 들어 삶의 불안정성, 불확실성, 이동성, 미끄러짐 등 ‘부정적 지구화’가 초래한 시대성을 꿰뚫은 바우만을 참조해 현대미술의 동시대적 특수성을 해명한다. 요컨대 동시대성/액체 모더니티를 공유하고 있는 비엔날레는 전 세계 150개 지역에서, 2년마다 엄청난 규모와 집합적 질서로 열리면서 그 자체 안에 액체 모더니티/유동성을 특화하고 있다.
  나아가 다른 관점에서, 벤야민의 역사철학적 미학을 바탕에 두고 비엔날레 문화 및 현대미술을 분석한다. 벤야민은 20세기 초 예술이 처한 실제 상황을 조명하고 당대 종교적, 정치적, 형이상학적, 사회 경제적, 기술적 경향들을 종합적으로 표현하는 근대 예술의 해방적 가능성을 분명히 하고자 했다. 우리는 그 이론적 관점을 공유해 유동하는 현대미술의 미학적 경향이 글로벌 사회와 연결돼 조건화되며, 기술의 역량을 비롯해 동시대 여러 특성 및 집단 현존과 상호작용하면서 스스로를 구현하고 잠재성을 가시화하고 있음을 밝힌다. 

The aim of this research is to analyse what is the aesthetic specificity of contemporary art. To carry out this complex purpose, I suggest some kind of crucial  relationship between contemporary society and contemporary art, and they have changing themselves by interacting each other over the last two decades. The contemporary art world has changed and expanded exponentially ―from form to contents― since 1990. Somewhere along the line, global contemporary art scenes put a high degree of liquidity as the critical concept of Zygmunt Bauman’s Sociology. That is one of my view point, and why I call contemporary art as 'liquid art'.
  This paper focuses on the phenomenon of biennial and/or ‘biennial culture’ as a most powerful exhibition type and influential art institution of contemporary art world. There have been a number of criticisms on biennials, most of which deal with their form, contents, function, logics, and effects. But my own argumentation is concentrated on their contemporary artistic character as a part of liquid modernity what Bauman defined the distinctive feature of this era being affected by negative globalization; contingency, uncertainty, mobility and slipperiness of everyday life. As part of the contemporaneity, the global biennial culture is having particular liquidity with its body; definitions of biennials vary from huge, global scaled shows with a two-year cycle, over 150 biennials in different locals/cities and social conditions. Today's biennial become a global dispositif/apparatus for exchanging, networking, shifting and competing of art scenes around the world in the liquid modernity.
    The other argumentation of my research is based on Walter Benjamin's philosophical-historical aesthetics which analysed the changed conditions of 20th century art. In "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility", Benjamin aimed to illuminate the real situations of arts and to suggest the liberated possibility of modern art that represent the theological, political, metaphysical, social, economical and technological tendencies. With his perspective on art, I try to explain the aesthetic specificity of contemporary art as a kind of liquid art that is widely engaging in global society and deeply connecting with our time.

This essay investigates Kukuli Velarde’s intervention in the permanent collection display of the New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum, Taiwan during 2014 Taiwan Ceramics Biennale, Terra Nova: Critical Currents / Contemporary Ceramics. Velarde’s intervention is used by the author as a vehicle for developing a model of artistic agency via a strategy of Virtual Ventriloquism. It  debates the problematic nature of the Yingge Museum’s permanent collection display, and encourages the development of a more sophisticated approach to the historical narrative of Taiwanese ceramics, and especially a more just and contemporary representation of the ceramics traditions of Taiwan’s first nations.

Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta: The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art is a well-researched and historically sensitive investigation of the so-called biennial phenomenon. The study sheds new light on the geographies and artistic lineages of these increasingly celebrated perennial art events, comprising of historical dialogues in diverse times and spaces from shows with often radically diverse political agendas. The authors claim that their book differs 'from the general demonization of biennials' (4), a claim, however, that appears slightly inflated given the domination of what could be called the 'double-edged' approach in the field (biennials are both good and bad at the same time, both politically/economically manipulated and potential civic platforms) and the relative absence of studies that would demonize the phenomenon in a totalizing way. By grasping, however, biennialization as a process that offers 'profound, critical insights into art's nexus with globalized commerce' (4), the authors do a good job in turning the spotlight on an array of largely neglected exhibitions of the biennial scene and literature. The examination of such exhibitions, including the Biennale de la Méditerranée in Alexandria, the Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane and the Emergency Biennial in Chechnya, and their insertion within global biennial histories, performs a careful decentring of the common Eurocentric orthodoxies that decisively loom over the field. And while this is undoubtedly the most useful contribution of Green and

“Towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century”, as Anthony  Gardner  and  Charles  Green propose, “biennials became self-conscious.” Increasingly they are reflecting on themselves as "hegemonic machines" (Oliver Marchart), and for this very reason also understand themselves as places of intervention. We  have  to come  to  terms  with  the  fact  that  biennials  today  are  both:  "Brandsand  Sites  of  Resistance", "Spaces of Capital and Hope" (Panos Kompatsiaris).The article follows withdrawals and protests as well as interventions and strategies of appropriation of biennials in the second decade of the21st century. Protests in  St.  Petersburg,  Sydney  and  New  York shape  the  biennials  they  boycott.  In  Kochi,  Athens, Dhaka,  and Kassel  we encounter  curatorial  projects  that  challenge  the  apparatus  of  value coding.  The  relationship between  bottom  up  and  top  down  often becomes  blurred.  In  Prague,  Warsaw,  Kiev,  and  Budapest  it  is even reversed. Here biennials are used as a means of counter-hegemony and institutional survival.

What is the scope of 'global art' and who drives its framing within the current climate of corporate globalization? In what ways do the recent global turn and curatorial turn underwrite meaningful global inclusivity and visibility, and to what degree does this globally shared art constitute mutuality? Does 'global art', including the accompanying process of biennialisation, allow for local narratives in a way that seriously accounts for a geopolitical view of contemporary art in the twenty-first century? While the inclusion of 'new art worlds' in what Belting, Buddensieg and Weibel (2013) term 'global art' is framed as a democratisation of contemporary art and the demise of the western art canon, it is important to raise questions regarding the blind spots of this supposedly global, post-1989 expansion.

In this article I analyse the current discourse of 'global art' as articulated in The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds (Belting, Buddensieg & Weibel 2013), focusing on its origin, transcription, mapping, consumption and ultimately, I
suggest, its emergence as a function of privilege. Challenging the charting of supposedly new art regions (Belting et al. 2013:100), which 'writes-out' local narratives and counter-narratives, I argue for a logic of subtraction in place of a logic of addition. While the latter triumphantly implies that 'new' art worlds have been added to the dominant core, the former is useful to a geopolitical perspective that strips away normative vision and actively seeks that which people often fail to see.

In this paper I analyse the work of CAPE Africa Platform in South Africa, which, while briefly and erroneously used as "evidence” of biennialisation and global expansion in The Global Contemporary, was locally referred to as 'not-another-biennial'. Discussing what some see as the shortcomings of the Cape 07 and Cape 09 exhibitions, I propose a reconsideration of measures of 'success' and 'failure', suggesting that an embrace of 'failure' can enable new ways of seeing the privilege of the contemporary art world. It is only when blanks, failures and things presumed not to exist are carefully regarded, that the goal of achieving mutually shared art on a global scale might become possible. Only then does it become apparent that the global south can have a certain edge over what is viewed as the prevailing art world.

Chinese contemporary art appears as a miscellaneous framework of autonomous institutions, practice and personalities engaged in finding their own position within the national and international art scene. Contemporary China’s peculiar art and cultural scenario is the result of a gradual, and yet ongoing renovation process of the entire national art institutions’ body. Such a phenomenon began with the third edition of Shanghai Biennale (2000), which was the very first attempt to demolish the traditional dichotomy between official and non-official art. This does not only embody Chinese artists’ will to stand out the world art scene,  but also the gradual establishment of new institutions trying to flank – and sometimes to replace – traditional art institutions.
In his recent study Thinking Contemporary Curating (2012), Australian art historian Terry Smith introduced the concept of Infrastructural shift. His theory suggests that the exhibition venues of artworks range between two apparently opposite extremes called “concrete” and “supplementary”. “Concrete” venues are for instance museums, which are also traditionally considered the most representative locations of artworks; “supplementary” venues are temporary locations, such as art collections, kunsthalle, alternative spaces, foundations and websites. Smith also identifies a third typology of institution, which is called large-scale exhibition (biennial or triennial), whose popularity has greatly increased in the last 10 years. This resulted a proper “infrastructural change” in the art scenario.
This article is part of the result of a careful on field research (with a specific focus on contemporary art museums and biennials) which was carried out in some of the most representative cities for the development of Chinese contemporary art, like Beijing, Shanghai, Canton and Shenzhen. The outcome of this research shows similarities with some of the phenomena described by Smith.

The importance of Hélio Oiticica’s ascension to the Morro of Mangueira to his career has been extensively studied and mythicized, and the indebtedness of his work to Afro-Brazilian culture has recently started receiving attention. Nevertheless, his oeuvre has not been explored with sufficient attention through the lens of malandragem, the use of tricks to outwit people in positions of power and restore a temporary sense of justice. I interpret malandragem as a legacy of the resistance enacted by enslaved Africans and their descendants against colonialism, slavery, and oppression. In this paper I analyze the work of an Afro-Brazilian artist from a previous generation, Heitor dos Prazeres, whose work was labeled “naïf” and “primitive” and, thus, ostracized from the history of modern art. Although it might seem unusual to pair the work of a figurative painter like dos Prazeres with that of Oiticica, an artist who not only never produced representational art, but even declared the death of traditional painting and dedicated his career to transposing the medium into space and time, in fact the culture of malandragem brings the two oeuvres together. Painter and samba composer, dos Prazeres was profoundly consequential in establishing the foundations of the cultural environment that Oiticica would draw from in the 1960s, where samba is just one aspect. Heitor dos Prazeres used malandragem to bend social barriers and infiltrate a hostile cultural world during the Estado Novo (1937-1945) and the following decades. His tactics should be considered precursors to the strategies that artists working under the military dictatorship (1964-1985) would enact to express dissent, as in the case of Hélio Oiticica.

A reflection on my research and publishing approach to the field of exhibition histories, with a focus on the books I have worked on with colleagues for Afterall (one a year since 2010): https://www.afterall.org/publications/exhibition.histories/ This text was commissioned by Mia Yu for her edited section of Art Monthly (Beijing) on exhibition histories; her introduction features alongside.

The author excavates the histories of both the Taiwan and Hong Kong Pavilions and their struggle to establish a “national” identity without having official national status within the Venice Biennial.


(Yishu: Journal of Chinese Contemporary Art.  Volume 12, Number 5, September/October 2013 )

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Chinese artists began to leave China, emigrating to the West to some of the world’s most established cultural hubs including the cities of Paris, Berlin and New York. This provided the opportunity for self-reflection, individual and collaborative reflective experiences on their identity, home country, origin, history, society, politics, and in turn, developed a new globalised Chinese artistic and curatorial practice that negotiated, to them, unknown Western paradigms and the canons of Western-centric art historical discourse. They were responsible for building a new “transcultural” Chinese art history that was to change the way in which Chinese art was translated.

All translations are subject to applied, different socio-historic contexts where ‘a heritage often produces a spectacle of essentialist national identity’ (Coombes 1992: 488), which in this paper is termed as international exoticism and “Chineseness” in the eyes of the West. This exoticism is part of what is known as the “disappearing world” phenomenon, where the West is seen to fear the over immersion, thus loss, of its own culture and heritage, and so looks beyond its own locality for a new fragile exoticism, a world yet unpresented through ‘difference’ (Coombes 1992: 491) - in this case China. Whilst it may seem to be stating the obvious, curators should try to act objectively and not get swayed by this exoticism or concept of “tradition”. As Coombes states,

‘…the cultural object can never be an empty vessel waiting to be filled with meaning, but rather is a repository replete with meanings that are never imminent but always contingent.’ (Coombes 1992: 489)

This paper will examine, as a case study, the representation of China as part of the renowned and longest-standing international art festival, the Venice Biennale (45th Venice Biennale entitled Cardinal Points of the Arts, Venice, Italy (14 June – 10 October 1993)) - a noteworthy moment in the translation of contemporary Chinese art on the international art stage. Entitled Passagio a Oriente (Passage to the East), this exhibition of purely avant-garde painting was presented through a survey exhibition using the curatorial strategies of international exoticism and “Chineseness”, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva with Helena Kontova with consultation from Li Xianting and Francesca Dal Lago. Through analysing the collaborative curatorial process employed here, and critical public opinion, I will aim to question, is this case study when Chinese art became contemporary and global within the international art world? Can curators recognise the cultural, political and economic infrastructures inherent in the artist’s artworks or objects on a local level, in China, before it is “transculturally” translated in the West? Or are we heading towards operating as a catch-all category where diverse artworks are grouped together for cultural plurality (Maharaj 1994:29)? Will this produce homogenized curatorial consequences? Does the acknowledgement of dialectic and cultural differences/nuances always mean that it will be translated as “foreign” or Chinese? Or is assimilation and adaptation needed as part of the curatorial strategy? Ultimately, can we escape a “Chineseness” of contemporary Chinese art?

Coombes, Annie (1992) ‘Inventing the ‘Postcolonial’: Hybridity and Constituency in Contemporary Curating’. In Donald Preziosi, (Ed.) (1998) The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (pp. 486-497). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Maharaj, Sarat (1994) ‘Perfidious Fidelity: The Untranslatability of the Other’. In Jean Fisher (Ed.) Global Visions: towards a new internationalism in the visual arts (pp. 28-35), London: Kala Press in association with The Institute of International Visual Arts.

https://documenta-studien.de/media/1/documenta_studies__8_Anthony_Gardner___Charles_Green_1.pdf

Editorial by Nanne Buurman

In Trade Routes: History and Geography: 2nd Johannesburg Biennale (1997), the first large biennial that he would direct in the course of
an extraordinary career of curatorial experimentation, curator Okwui Enwezor presciently selected art that explored themes of migration, cultural traffic, and sites of crisis. This essay by Anthony Gardner and Charles Green explains that his biennial occurred at precisely such a moment of crisis in postapartheid South Africa, when attention from the restlessly moving international art world biennial circuit meant little to local audiences, who were struggling with ongoing inequalities, economic hardships, financial uncertainties and constant change in their municipal power structures. This eventually led to a shut-down of the Biennale before its scheduled end.

Enwezor’s biennial was, the authors of Biennials, Triennials and documenta. The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art (2016) argue, the site of an intense and telling disagreement about the role of a biennial of contemporary art in a time of crisis. It was caught in the frictions between Enwezor’s internationalist ambition to scrutinize globalization from a postnational perspective, hailed by international reviewers, and South African demands for identity politics and nation building at a time
of enforced financial austerity, all resulting in a sometimes hostile local reception and its marginal importance to civic leaders.

Although located in a radically different time and space, the critical reception of the second Johannesburg Biennale seems to foreshadow the response that documenta 14 (2017) received twenty years later in Athens, where curator Adam Szymczyk was blamed for crisis tourism,
for turning Athens into an exemplary showcase of the destructiveness of neoliberal austerity measures while allegedly not taking into account the needs of the local scene enough. And it is perhaps no coincidence that the authors draw attention to the necessity to understand the power and nuances of such patterns of critique in the wake of Brexit, in an era when nationalist policies have gained new momentum across the globe and the dream of a postnational world seems to move out of reach. In times like these, we should turn to Okwui Enwezor’s legacy, reminding ourselves one year after the curator’s tragically early death, that his exhibitions were always generous interventions within specific and charged histories, opening up new realities yet to come.

Following the new millennium, art festivals spread rapidly all over Japan, this research estimates that there were 25 active art festivals up until 2015. These festivals have three features in common; most of them were established after the turn of the 21st century, their main aim is regional revitalisation, and the majority of them take the form of either a triennial or a biennial.
This study aimed to investigate the form and impact of art festivals in contemporary Japan. Firstly, the author looked at the history and development of Biennials and triennials around the world, then examined the development of art festivals in Japan. Secondly, research was carried out to examine the actual situation of art festivals in Japan now through indepth
interviews or questionnaire-based surveys with directors or
managers of these festivals, as well as other researchers working in this area in Japan itself.
The results of this investigation show that the three main reasons why art festivals developed the way they did are to be found in their social, cultural and political background. In addition, the author observed different tendencies in the festivals started in rural areas than those started in urban
areas. The rural arts festivals tended to have local and regional
regeneration and revitalisation as their main aim, hoping to solve social problems of depopulation, and an aging population, whilst urban arts festivals were aimed largely at cultural development and regeneration. The majority of these festivals preferred to choose the form of a triennial, the reason for this was that most of them were organised in conjunction with
local government, so a great deal of time was needed between events to work through the need for accountability, the various organisational structures and other complicating planning procedures. The most significant impact of these festivals was the social impact, especially in terms of regeneration. The main problems that emerged from the research for art festivals in Japan were; management stability especially within local government; homogenisation of the festivals; and the limited
supply of experienced curators in Japan. The conclusion of this paper is that in future Japan needs these festivals to be rooted in the local community much more, and not just reliant on art and artists to solve what are essentially social and political problems. Festival organisers should consider the limitations to what art festivals alone can achieve. It is anticipated that the art festival movement in Japan will not end as a temporary movement, but will see continued growth and development
with more variety and creative expansion in the future.