Obscuring representation: contemporary art biennials in Dakar and Taipei (original) (raw)
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Theme park follies: the publics of art biennials in Dakar and Taipei
Urban Geography, 2022
In yet another variation on a theme park, the contemporary art biennial establishes host cities as cultural destinations. The qualities of these events, their various exclusivities, esoteric referentialities, and circulating stars reflect a form of "pure imageability" (p. xiv) (Sorkin, M. [1992]. Introduction: Variations on a theme park. In M. Sorkin (Ed.), Variations on a theme park: The new American city and the end of public space (pp. xi-xv). Hill and Wang.). Reducing art events to their functions for city branding, marketing, or as a tourist attraction is hardly satisfying as a qualitative analysis reveals their various (sometimes conflicting) intentions. Inspired by Sorkin's writing about public space, this paper considers one of these aims: the engagement of various publics. Bringing in school groups and indigenous rights activists through outreach programs and curation reflects attempts to make biennials more accessible and inclusive. The struggles to expand their publics, however, also reveal entrenched forms of exclusion. Despite political, economic or health crises art biennials persist. Their resilience reinscribes segregated urban lives, a reminder that follies are not necessarily fragile.
Persistent universals in biennial research: a perspective from the Biennale of Dakar.
In Andre Gingrich (ed.), Anthropology in Motion: Encounters with Current Trajectories of Scholarship from Austria. The RAI Country Series vol. 4. Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing. Pp. 92-111., 2021
I argue in this chapter that many of these universalized characteristics of the biennial result from looking from the vantage point of those biennials favoured by dominant international art discourses. In the following sections, I discuss several issues that emerge from the perspective of my own research on the Biennale of Dakar: Dak’Art. The first section is dedicated to the production of biennial models for scholarly ways of coping with a global history of this phenomenon. In this context the notion of ‘biennial culture’ is central. Instead of conceiving this ‘biennial culture’ in relationship to a unitary global multitude of biennials and studying the structures common to all of them, I reject these models and argue for conceiving the ‘world culture’ (Hannerz 1990) of biennials as interconnected networks. This shifts the focus onto this multitude as the non-centralized organization of diversity, and thus encourages investigation of biennials as locally specific cultural institutions, though interconnected with others. The second section raises three central themes that follow from this shift to breaking down the system of biennials into smaller networks: knowledge regarding the multitude of art practices from all over the world; the role of curators and/or curatorial teams in conceptualizing biennial exhibitions; and whether biennial art discourses produce canonical art. First, the idea of assembling art from all over the world must be reviewed in terms of the scope of the knowledge that such an objective demands. Simply illustrating this multitude by juxtaposing the art selected may by now be a dead end. Second, researchers acknowledge that biennial exhibitions are largely informed by a small number of highly renowned curators. Hence, they filter this multitude of art creations by means of their knowledge, preferences and tastes, but this provides a restricted view of worldwide contemporary art, what often is referred to as ‘biennial art’. Third, this raises the question of another widely shared assumption, namely that present-day canonical art is produced in relation to the biennials’ exhibits – thus creating new hierarchies between art forms.
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.
Image & Text : a Journal for Design, 2015
What is the scope of "global art" and who drives its framing within the current climate of 'corporate globalization' (Demos 2009:7, emphasis in original)? 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" 2 in what Belting, Buddensieg and Weibel (2013) term "global art" is framed as a democratisation of 1. Thank you to Dr. Alexandra Dodd for the insightful feedback she provided. 2. This term is used in the title of Belting, Buddensieg and Weibel's 2013 book, The global contemporary and the rise of new art worlds.
New geographies of the biennial: networks for the globalization of art
GeoJournal, 2021
In order to explore global biennials of contemporary art, this study provides a geospatial analysis of eleven global biennials to examine where artists are drawn from in these international exhibitions. The project aims to cut across a broad scope of biennials held in multiple regions to examine how artists are circulating in the contemporary world, where they are showing and, most importantly, how biennials are defining international contemporary art in the era of globalization. By mapping a series of biennials held around the globe over several iterations in the 2010s, this study provides unprecedented evidence of the geography of biennial selection among major exhibitions, how this has changed over time and whether patterns emerge for participation in global art world events. More than half of these biennials are held in countries that are in the Global South; this means that most of these locations are emerging art centers responding to new economic patterns under globalization. The use of maps to show the geographic distribution of biennial participants will point to various, competing models of the geography of global contemporary art and will allow reflection upon how new biennials are changing the geospatial dynamics of international art exhibitions today.
Art Biennials as Contested Spaces
The Mediterranean: The Sea of Conflicting Spiritualties, 2017
or the past thirty years, the Turkish contemporary art scene has expanded both inward and outward with aid from the European Union, sponsorship from private corporations, and the attention of the international art world since the foundation of the Istanbul Biennial in 1987. Whilst the Istanbul Biennial internationalises Turkish contemporary art, the opposition against the increasing monopoly of this major art event continues to grow in the local art scene. The protests, activist performances, and open condemnations received unprecedented attention in the mainstream media and pushed discussions on the Biennial beyond niche art circles into the public sphere. The critics of the Istanbul Biennial, which include two opposing segments of the Turkish Left, the Kemalist nationalists and the anarchists, are quite hostile to the biennial phenomenon in general. The Kemalist nationalists see the Istanbul Biennial as the imprint of imperial cultural colonialism because of its role as the vessel of exchange between the international art world and the Turkish contemporary art scene. The main artistic camp supporting this ideology, occupying positions in fifty-six art academies in Turkey, disregards experimental or postmodern art, whilst claiming to be the artistic and political platform engendering modernist and nationalist discourses. On the other hand, the anarchist activists base their arguments on art's relationship with the corporations that circulate global capital through financial markets, real estate