Biennials Triennials And Documenta

This innovative new history examines in-depth how the growing popularity of large-scale international survey exhibitions, or 'biennials', has influenced global contemporary art since the 1950s. Provides a comprehensive global history of biennialization from the rise of the European star-curator in the 1970s to the emergence of mega-exhibitions in Asia in the 1990s Introduces a global array of case studies to illustrate the trajectory of biennials and their growing influence on artistic expression, from the Biennale de la Méditerranée in Alexandria, Egypt in 1955, the second Havana Biennial of 1986, New York’s Whitney Biennial in 1993, and the 2002 Documenta11 in Kassel, to the Gwangju Biennale of 2014 Explores the evolving curatorial approaches to biennials, including analysis of the roles of sponsors, philanthropists and biennial directors and their re-shaping of the contemporary art scene Uses the history of biennials as a means of illustrating and inciting further discussions of globalization in contemporary art

This innovative new history examines in-depth how the growing popularity of large-scale international survey exhibitions, or 'biennials', has influenced global contemporary art since the 1950s. Provides a comprehensive global history of biennialization from the rise of the European star-curator in the 1970s to the emergence of mega-exhibitions in Asia in the 1990s Introduces a global array of case studies to illustrate the trajectory of biennials and their growing influence on artistic expression, from the Biennale de la Méditerranée in Alexandria, Egypt in 1955, the second Havana Biennial of 1986, New York’s Whitney Biennial in 1993, and the 2002 Documenta11 in Kassel, to the Gwangju Biennale of 2014 Explores the evolving curatorial approaches to biennials, including analysis of the roles of sponsors, philanthropists and biennial directors and their re-shaping of the contemporary art scene Uses the history of biennials as a means of illustrating and inciting further discussions of globalization in contemporary art

Global biennials have proliferated in the contemporary art world, but artists’ engagement with large-scale international exhibitions has a much longer history that has influenced the present in important ways. Going back to the earliest world’s fairs in the nineteenth century, this book argues that “globalism” was incubated in a century of international art contests and today constitutes an important tactic for artists. As world’s fairs brought millions of attendees into contact with foreign cultures, products, and processes, artworks became juxtaposed in a “theater of nations,” which challenged artists and critics to think outside their local academies. From Gustave Courbet’s rebel pavilion near the official art exhibit at the 1855 French World’s Fair to curator Beryl Madra’s choice of London-based Cypriot Hussein Chalayan for the off-site Turkish pavilion at the 2006 Venice Biennale, artists have used these exhibitions to reflect on contemporary art, speak to their own governments back home, and challenge the wider geopolitical realm—changing art and art history along the way. Ultimately, Caroline A. Jones argues, the modern appetite for experience and event structures, which were cultivated around the art at these earlier expositions, have now come to constitute contemporary art itself, producing encounters that transform the public and force us to reflect critically on the global condition.

This book extends a theory of art that addresses the present era’s shift towards global pluralism. By focusing on extrinsic rather than intrinsic qualities of art, this book helps viewers evaluate art across cultural boundaries. Art can be universally classified by an evaluation of its guiding narrative, and can be understood and judged through hermeneutical methods. Since artists engage culture through various local, transnational, and emerging global narratives, it is difficult to decipher what standards are used for evaluation, and which authoritative body evaluates the work. This book implements a narrative-hermeneutical approach to properly classify an artwork and establish its meaning and value.

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.

Curating in a Time of Ecological Crisis reaffirms the relevance and impactful role of art, revealing how contemporary art exhibitions can capture the zeitgeist and advance new and collaborative approaches to a more sustainable inhabitation of Earth. The book is largely focused on biennales, which it argues are the contemporary exhibition models with the greatest capacity to offer new perspectives and propose alternative ways of connecting with our social and natural environments. Felicity Fenner demonstrates this by showing how curators of these high-profile exhibitions are responding in creative and engaging ways to the issues that preoccupy artists and society more broadly, of which the ecological crisis is paramount. Drawing on case studies from different parts of the world, the author reveals how biennales can make a constructive contribution to debates and attitudes around climate change, and how the role of the curator has evolved to re-embrace a duty of care not just to art but to the natural world as well. Curating in a Time of Ecological Crisis investigates how large-scale exhibitions of contemporary international art can become agents of change. As such, the book will be essential reading for scholars, students, and practitioners with an interest in exhibitions, curating, contemporary art, and environmental sustainability.

Through its examination of five quite different art events in cities across Europe, Contemporary Art Biennials in Europe offers a compelling exploration of how public art takes place in the modern city. Roughly tracing a central horizontal trajectory from the western to the eastern edges of the continent, Nicolas Whybrow considers the Folkestone Triennial in the UK, Sculpture Projects Münster in Germany, the Venice Biennale in Italy, Belgrade's Mikser Festival in Serbia and the Istanbul Biennial in Turkey. Writing within the context of a thirty-year international 'biennial boom', Whybrow interrogates the extent to which biennial events and their artworks seek to engage with the socio-cultural and political complexity of cities, in particular the work that is involved in this relationship. With its focus on Europe, he also tells a composite story of continental difference at a moment of high tension, centering on issues of migration, political populism and uncertainty around the future form of the European Union.

A rapid proliferation of large-scale perennial exhibitions has resulted in the biennial / triennial becoming an integral part of field of architecture. Biennials / Triennials questions a range of curatorial agents and visits sites of recent exhibitions that reveal what is at stake in the newfound ubiquity of the architectural -ennial.