“Biennials of the South on the Edges of the Global” A. Gardner and C. Green

For our inaugural text of this series of readings we want to share with you “Biennials of the South on the Edges of the Global” written by Anthony Gardner and Charles Green, a text which might not be very recent (as it was published in 2013 by Thrid Text) but nevertheless addresses some of the most urgent issues today in the practice of biennial making.

Taking a critical stance as where to find the origin of the biennial model as we understand it today, the two researchers convincingly argue about a need to switch viewpoint when investigating the genesis of the model from a centralising perspective to that of the South. This perspective, in which the term “South” is used in a broad way to describe “a zone of agency and creation, not simply poverty and exploitation”, is also the main reason we wanted to share this as our first text as it is an approach and viewpoint which has been at the very centre of our attempt as IBA to place biennials throughout the world in dialogue.

In a compelling even if at times a little loosely associated account on “other possible origins” (the canonical one being Venice 1895), the article presents a case for a model which owes some of its key characteristics to a wave of exhibitions throughout the “Third-World” (seen as the political-ideological alternative to capitalist and communist blocks of non-aligned countries) from Indonesia to South America passing from Egypt, Iraq and Yugoslavia. While it is stressed in the article that many of these were still shaped around a traditional view of the arts as divided into classical categories (painting, sculpture, etching, graphics and so on), it is likewise evident how, these exhibitions and their surrounding program allowed for an unprecedented cultural exchange and circulation of works outside a western/capitalist logic.

Rather than analysing in detail the arguments of the article we want to focus on one aspect raised in it by the authors and with particular relevance to the current situation.

“The importance of which often lay less in the assemblage of artworks than in the gatherings of artists, commissioners, writers and publics from within and outside a given region. In some instances – and this was especially true with Ljubljana, which became a vital meeting-point for artists, curators and diplomats from the US, Britain, Romania, Yugoslavia and elsewhere – biennials allowed people to acquire visas and cross frontiers that would have been extremely difficult, if not necessarily impossible, to cross without the justification of attending the exhibition.” (ibid. p. 450)

What emerges throughout the pages of the article is not just the geo-political importance of this element of biennials but rather, and maybe even more so, their importance in creating a cultural dialogue within a specific region with the potential to generate an emancipatory process in respect to the perceived “center”.

While certainly it is difficult to see the model completely disentangled from its western-colonial model, the examples analysed by Gardner and Green give us a sense as to how it could be seen as an alternate vision of the art world based on regionalism (or as quoted in the article “critical transregionalism”, a term first introduced by Ranjit Hoskote and Nancy Adajania) and the creation of alternative knowledge networks. These arguments could further be used to counter a prevailing pejorative use of the term “biennalisation” as a culturally homogenising factor.

In current times these kind of alternative networks are put under further stress not only by the travelling limitation brought about by the Covid19 pandemic but also by the increasing call for a more environmentally aware practice within the art world generally to avoid creating events with an unnecessary high carbon footprint. The question which emerges then is how we (individually and as association of biennials) can imagine a future in which the model retains the potentiality for dialogue between west and south while also considering the wider implication of this divide in terms of exploitation of resources of all kind.

REFERENCES/COPYRIGHT:
The full article is available, prior subscription, under the following link http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2013.810892