Curating Resistances: Ambivalences and Potentials of Contemporary Art Biennials (original) (raw)
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The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials: Spectacles of Critique, Theory and Art
Routledge, 2017
Contemporary art biennials are sites of prestige, innovation and experimentation, where the category of art is meant to be in perpetual motion, rearranged and redefined, opening itself to the world and its contradictions. They are sites of a seemingly peaceful cohabitation between the elitist and the popular, where the likes of Jeff Koons encounter the likes of Guy Debord, where Angela Davis and Frantz Fanon share the same ground with neoliberal cultural policy makers and creative entrepreneurs. Building on the legacy of events that conjoin art, critical theory and counterculture, from Nova Convention to documenta X, the new biennial blends the modalities of protest with a neoliberal politics of creativity. This book examines a strained period for these high art institutions, a period when their politics are brought into question and often boycotted in the context of austerity, crisis and the rise of Occupy cultures. Using the 3rd Athens Biennale and the 7th Berlin Biennale as its main case studies, it looks at how the in-built tensions between the domains of art and politics take shape when spectacular displays attempt to operate as immediate activist sites. Drawing on ethnographic research and contemporary cultural theory, this book argues that biennials both denunciate the aesthetic as bourgeois category and simultaneously replicate and diffuse an exclusive sociability across social landscapes.
The Art Biennial’s Dilemma: Political Activism as Spectacle in Aesthetic Capitalism
2020
In recent decades, the biennial has become the most widespread mode of showcasing contemporary art. Rather than acting as mere aesthetic containers, these shows aspire to be socially relevant by raising questions about capitalism, colonialism, inequality, environmental devastation, and gender imbalances. In this chapter, we draw from ethnographic observation of the 7th Berlin Biennale (2012) that took place in the context of a rising anti-capitalist discourse reflected in the Occupy movement and the movement of the squares. We explore the outcome of curators’ attempts to disrupt existing practices by introducing the logic of activism. Drawing from empirical vignettes, we identify three institutional rationales that coexisted, clashed, and mutually displaced this logic, reaffirming rather than disrupting the idea that art has to preserve some distance from social reality, that neo-anarchist activism should prefigure social reality in the here and now, and that the configuration of th...
Biennial Art and its Rituals: Value, Political Economy and Artfulness
Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2019
The visual art of the last decades privileges, explicitly or implicitly, social rather than art historical or aesthetic issues. In sites ranging from university classrooms and journals to museums and biennials, the emphasis is usually put on how effectively art handles the social issues of the day while questions of aesthetic value are often treated as suspicious and ideological. Given this anti-art character in these contexts of mediation, the insistence to perceive the objects as artistic objects constitutes a paradox that has been rarely discussed in sociological terms. This article draws on ethnographic research in order to explore “biennial art” that is to say the art that displayed in contemporary art and international platforms of showcasing. These platforms struggle to maintain a concept of art as social practice while at the same time nurture an exclusive and highbrow environment in which “artfulness” is key. I call this quality artfulness so as to both underline its artificiality as well as the inventiveness and skills required for its production. Artfulness in these sites is enabled through various formal or informal rituals of valorization, including guided tours, curatorial statements, media promoting activities and artist talks. These rituals, positioning certain objects within the sphere of art and producing them as objects meriting aesthetic interpretation, resemble the politics of publicity found in aesthetic capitalism at large. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20004214.2019.1627847 KEYWORDS: Contemporary art, aesthetics, biennials, politics of art, Rancière, conceptual art, ethnography, art and value
Just Another Exhibition: Histories and Politics of Biennials
"In the last twenty years the “Biennale” has become a prominent exhibition model, disseminated all over the globalized art system. A laboratory for curatorial experimentation, the Biennale has come to affect and make visible international exhibition practices. Conversations with Thomas Hirschhorn, Alfredo Jaar, Antoni Muntadas, and Stéphanie Moisdon focus on the questions brought about by each chapter, and open up to different ways of thinking about national representation, history-making and conceptualization of biennials’ exhibition formats in contemporary art. "
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.
Scales, Politics, and Political Economies of Contemporary Art Biennials
Arts & International Affairs, 2018
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.
Contemporary Art Biennials - Our Hegemonic Machines in Times of Emergency
Julia Bethwaite, Dorothee I Richter, Henk Slager, Daniela Labra, Rime Fetnan, Dr. Shwetal A Patel, PhD, Ronald Kolb, Dr Katerina Valdivia Bruch, Nathalie Zonnenberg, per gunnar eeg-tverbakk, giulia colletti
OnCurating - Contemporary Art Biennials - Our Hegemonic Machines in Times of Emergency, 2020
Biennials are each in their own way a complex constellation of different economical and geopolitical, and representational cultural aspects within its own power relations. With all their underlying deficiencies (canonical, hegemonic, colonialist, hot money-funded, politically influenced, hierarchical), biennials tend to establish international discourse, at best, rooted in local cultural specificities and contexts. With this edition of the journal, we wanted to include a variety of cases and research areas, not ordered along a historical trajectory, but rather, ordered by theme. With a mix of over sixty new contributions and reprints of important articles for the biennale discourse this issue is like a biennale: too much to experience at once. Contributors Agustina Andreoletti, Rasheed Araeen, Defne Ayas, Marco Baravalle, Alessia Basilicata, Julia Bethwaite, Amy Bruce, Sabeth Buchmann, Vasyl Cherepanyn, Sven Christian, Ana Paula Cohen, Giulia Colletti, Catherine David, Ekaterina Degot, Diana Dulgheru, Per Gunnar Eeg-Tverbakk, Okwui Enwezor, Brandon Farnsworth, Rime Fetnan, Patrick D. Flores, Natasha Ginwala, Eva González-Sancho Bodero, Resmi Görüş, Martin Guinard, Bregtje van der Haak, Catalina Imizcoz, Răzvan Ion, Andrés Jaque, Melody Du Jingyi, Anni Kangas, Daniel Knorr, Omar Kholeif, Ronald Kolb, Panos Kompatsiaris, Yacouba Konaté, Daniela Labra, Ilse Lafer, Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, Bruno Latour, Teobaldo Lagos Preller, Eva Lin, Yung Ma, Anna Manubens, Sarat Maharaj, Oliver Marchart, Federica Martini, Vittoria Martini, Lara van Meeteren, Louli Michaelidou, Christian Morgner, Gerardo Mosquera, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Rafal Niemojewski, Ksenija Orelj, Anita Orzes, Shwetal A. Patel, Delia Popa, Farid Rakun, Raqs Media Collective, Dorothee Richter, Roma Jam Session art Kollektiv, Miriam La Rosa, Mona Schubert, Henk Slager, Robert E. D’Souza, Nora Sternfeld, Fatoş Üstek, Katerina Valdivia Bruch, Mirjam Varadinis, Raluca Voinea, Wilson Yeung Chun Wai, Bart Wissink, Beat Wyss, Xinming Xia, Nathalie Zonnenberg
Venice Biennale: The Art of Communicating Resistance, Resistance as Art
Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 2019
This essay examines contemporary art as a tool of political resistance against existing and emerging ideologies as well as controversial and discriminatory cultural norms. On the example of the 2017 Venice Biennale, this research project analyses art, and more specifically, selected nation-specific exhibits, as pieces of critical pedagogy, representative of ideological and cultural resistance. Concentrating on the comparative analysis of art exhibits from US-American, Russian, and German national pavilions, this research project explains what their respective art communicates, what the main messages are, and elaborates on the impact, the salience, and the affect the exhibits have on their numerous audiences today, when the sphere of international and intercultural relations is challenged like never before. This essay further demonstrates that the exhibits challenge and critique the past and the present of their respective national cultures and attempt to refocus and humanize the future in the globalized world.