From tourist attraction to political platforms biennales are part of a global network that not only produces and disseminates contemporary art but also grapples with current issues of race, identity, globalisation, and postcolonialism.

Today there are more than 100 art biennales in the world and this phenomenon is growing as every city seems to be planning one. Biennales are large-scale exhibitions of contemporary art, named for their host city. They are organised by a mix of philanthropic supporters, corporate sponsors, cultural forums, public art museums and government agencies. Mediating the local, national and transnational, biennales invite native and foreign artists from around the globe and exhibit their art across multiple indoor and outdoor venues such as galleries, abandoned factories, public parks and waterfronts.

Artworks range from traditional, mixed and multimedia products complemented by public space or room-filling installations and assemblages enhanced with high definition video technology. The accompanying talk forums, performances, opening night parties and secondary exhibitions staged around the margins make the biennale an immersive, weeks-long arts festival. Prominent biennales are thus attractive to city planners, investors, local politicians and reformers from many walks who want to develop their cities and educate people through art, as well as support tourism and foster a local identity.

Biennales are part of a global network that not only produces and disseminates contemporary art but also grapples with current issues of race, identity, globalisation and postcolonialism

The biennales format has evolved from the World Fair platform which served industrial nations during the 19th century. The first biennial in 1895, initiated by the mayor of Venice, was not organised by a collective of artists, a collector/patron, or by a cultural institution. Entrance was free to people who produced a rail ticket to the city — which suggests that it was developed to encourage a rising bourgeois tourism.

Contemporary biennales are theme-oriented but agenda specificity is often determined by the host country’s social, political or economic requirements. In the ’50s a set of new biennales emerged which changed the concept and widened the reasons for staging them. In 1951, when the Sao Paulo Biennial was founded, Brazil was attempting to push for an ambitious modernist agenda to reform the state and form an independent, modern national cultural identity.

Among leading biennales and triennials, Documenta in Kassel, Germany (held every five years), was initiated in 1955 to bring Germany back into dialogue with the rest of the world after the end of World War II. New York’s famous Whitney Biennial which began in 1973 is often fondly referred to as the exhibition one loves to hate.

Another prestigious biennales, The International Istanbul biennales, introduced in 1987, favours an exhibition model which enables a dialogue between artists and the audience through the work of the artists instead of a national representation model.

The Dakar Biennale, founded in 1992 is the largest exposition of contemporary African art and black artists around the world, and draws visitors and artists from all over the globe to Senegal. The Gwangju Biennale, Asia’s first contemporary art biennale, was launched in September 1995 in memory of the civil uprising connected with the 1980 repression of the Gwangju Democratisation Movement.

The mushrooming of biennales has decentralised art and created multiple art systems. It has provided a platform for artists from what used to be called “peripheral areas” of the world to practice and enter into the conversation of contemporary art. In this light the first art biennales in Havana in the ’80s may actually be more representative of the current exhibition format than the prototypical Venice Biennale because the Havana model’s aim was to provide opportunities for mutual understanding, support and development of cultural strategies for the Third World countries and to strengthen their position in relation to the hegemonic First World.

Our current understanding of artistic practice as an instrument of social and political knowledge owes much to the proliferation of decentralised multi-art production on the biennales platform. The most important steps in this development have been taken not by the biennales of the West, but by those of the periphery. By highlighting identity issues, racial tensions, economic inequities and polarising politics, anti — (or what Oliever Marchart calls biennales of Resistance) and postcolonial biennales have challenged the power of definition held by the West. It is the compelling emergent narratives addressing plural subjectivities that will generate fresh and unexpected sparks in future biennales agendas.

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 27th, 2017