Perennial Biennial is Searching for Local Biennial Discourse for Upcoming Publication

Courtesy of the Perennial Biennial.

The Perennial Biennial is a partnership of five European contemporary art biennials working together to develop and explore sustainable models for perennial practices in the biennial field. The project runs as a year-round collaboration between Liverpool Biennial, Berlin Biennial, RIBOCA, MGLC and Bergen Assembly. Initiated in September 2018, it runs until September 2022 and is supported by Creative Europe, the European Union’s programme to support the cultural, creative and audio-visual sectors.

The Perennial Biennial is currently working on a new publication engaging with the biennial format as it is encountered, engaged with, and critiqued in its local context. We are reaching out to biennials, artists, collaborators and others for existing texts written in response to biennials in their local context, and specifically published outside of the international biennial discourse.

Working from the proposition that the urgencies, responses and discussions that we see around biennials locally are significantly different to the ones we find in the international biennial discourse, we believe that there is much potential learning to be gained from lifting these debates up to an international platform.

We are searching for articles, opinion pieces and debates that have been ongoing in the local press around biennials – historical as well as contemporary. We hope to collect a wide range of formats about different contexts and types of biennials, in different languages and from across the world. The texts will be brought together in a digital publication due to come out Summer 2022.

HOW TO SUBMIT AND PROCESS

All proposed texts must be submitted to perennialbiennial@bergenassembly.no by midnight October 24, 2021.

Please send a short paragraph, of maximum 500 words, explaining the significance of the text or debate as well as a copy of the text in question, preferably in a format that allows text recognition.

Selected texts will be professionally translated, and we will additionally commission a contextualizing short introduction by the person nominating. The nomination and introduction of selected texts will be remunerated with a fee of 400 Euro and the rights of original text will be cleared on a case-by-case basis. We aim to respond to all submissions by December 2021.

ABOUT PERENNIAL BIENNIAL

The project supports research, writing and the formulation of new narratives in the biennial field through collaborative working, staff exchanges and the sharing of expertise and models for sustainable practice. Its aim is to create a dynamic European platform of exchange which will strengthen the contemporary art sector at global, European and local level.