Biennials Without Borders
“Jetting in and out of likely locations, they have no time to assimilate, still less to understand, the artistic production in any one place. From the viewpoint of those living and working in distant outposts, mega-curators and global artists may seem well connected; but they remain, by the very nature of the enterprise, more or less culturally rootless. At the same time, this deracination gives them a position of advantage, if not of privilege; for them, biennials do indeed have no frontiers. But for the majority outside the magic circle, real barriers still remain. The biennial, the most popular institutional mechanism of the last two decades for the organization of large-scale international art exhibitions, has, despite its decolonizing and democratic claims, proved still to embody the traditional power structures of the contemporary Western art world; the only difference being that ‘Western’ has quietly been replaced by a new buzzword, ‘global’.”
-Biennials Without Borders, by Chin-Tao Wu
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article only confirms what most people already know regarding the nature of biennials, with the help of statistical data drawn from Documenta.
what to take away is that contemporary ‘nomadic’ curators indeed may not live up to their superstar reputation - after all, how do you assimilate yourself with the social context in which the biennial is held, within just a time span of merely 1-2 years of preparation? to put together a biennial that is socially relevant and that truly engages the community requires more time than a few years.