Biennials — Art on a Global Scale

Vogel, Sabine B.

doi:10.1007/978-3-7091-0251-0

Cited by 16 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…Since its establishment in 1895, the Biennale has been perhaps the most important contemporary art exhibition in the world, attracting the attention of various publics: artists, politicians, art market actors, journalists, tourists, and so on. The imperial powers of the time -Belgium, Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia and Hungary -built the first national pavilions in the Giardini, the gardens in the east of Venice, in the period of 1907-1912(Vogel, 2010. This was an attempt to "recreate a miniaturised world" where the key players of world politics would sit next to each other (Sassatelli, 2016: 279).…”

Section: Heteronomy Of the Venice Biennalementioning

confidence: 99%

Parties, Pavilions and Protests: The Heteronomous World Politics of the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

Bethwaite

Kangas

2019

New Perspectives

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This paper focuses on the role of contemporary art in international relations and world politics. In IR, art is often examined within the framework of cultural diplomacy, country branding, and soft power, or approached as a site of resistance. We argue that the concept of heteronomy offers an alternative conceptual framework for analysing contemporary art in world politics. It highlights the interaction of various fields such as art, commerce, the state and media. We concretise this approach with an analysis of the Venice Biennale. We show that the Biennale is heteronomous in the sense of being an arena where actors from various fields struggle for power by accumulating different types of capital. We focus our analysis on the Russian national pavilion in 2011–2015 and show how the efforts of the country's elite to legitimise its position intertwined with the projects of the state, sponsors, artists, curators and art market actors.

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Section: Heteronomy Of the Venice Biennalementioning

confidence: 99%

Parties, Pavilions and Protests: The Heteronomous World Politics of the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

Bethwaite

Kangas

2019

New Perspectives

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“…A city council initiative, the Biennale was nationalized during the fascist regime, reformed in the 1970s, then became an independent not-for-profit foundation in 2004. However, it still maintains strong links, financial and otherwise, with state and other public institutions, a feature common to the majority of newer biennials regardless of their heterogeneity, as is the initiating role of local authorities and charismatic individuals (Tang, 2007;Vogel, 2010). 5 Already in his influential history of the Biennale from its inception to the 1960s, art critic and curator Lawrence Alloway (a key figure in the consecration of pop art, whose introduction to a wide European public is attributed to the 1964 Venice Biennale) advances the narrative of an expansion progressively hollowing out the original function of exhaustive survey.…”

Section: A World Of Biennialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is in the 1990s and 2000s that the proliferation became a phenomenon, with today over 150 biennials and derivatives listed by the recently founded Biennial Foundation and by the International Biennial Association, 6 in themselves signs of institutionalization and 'global' reach. Currently there are biennials in at least 50 countries, with particular concentrations in Europe and Asia (Vogel, 2010). Most of them do not select and display work on the basis of nationality but with a thematic focus.…”

Section: A World Of Biennialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Symbolic Production in the Art Biennial: Making Worlds

Sassatelli

2016

Theory, Culture & Society

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Biennials – periodic, independent and international exhibitions surveying trends in visual art – have with startling speed become key nodes in linking production, distribution and consumption of contemporary art. Cultural production and consumption have been typically separated in research, neglecting phenomena, like biennials, sitting in between. Biennials have become, however, key sites of both the production of art’s discourse and where that discourse translates into practices of display and contexts of appreciation. They are, this article argues, key sites of art’s symbolic production. Symbolic production is what makes a work, an artist, or even a genre visible and relevant, providing its sense in a system of classifications and, in an exhibition like a biennial, literally giving it a place in the scene. This article proposes a cultural analysis of biennials, focusing on the Venice Biennale, founded in 1895 and the first of the genre, through which we can trace biennials’ rise and transformations.

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“…The historical analysis has largely disregarded the role of the Curator in the formation of biennials. For instance, Vogel’s Biennials, Art on a Global Scale (2010), briefly analyzes the biennials of the Global South in Sao Paulo, Havana, İstanbul, Sidney, and New Delhi to propose an analytical framework for large exhibitions around the world. Vogel’s assessment of the center‐periphery dynamics in these exhibitions did not consider the İstanbul Biennials as potential outliers to the data, nor does that analysis focus on the role of a curator, or more specifically the significance of a Curator at the helm of these events.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Quest for Curatorial Authority: Beral Madra and The First Two İstanbul Biennials

Yilmaz

2021

Curator The Museum Journal

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Since the early 1990s, large‐scale, recurring exhibitions, known as biennials, triennials, or the quinquennial exhibition Documenta, have turned into platforms that define contemporary global art. A few years before the turn of such cultural globalization, the First İstanbul Biennial in 1987 planted its roots and turned İstanbul into one of the global contemporary art hubs in the world. This paper examines the first two İstanbul Biennials both organized by Beral Madra,1 one of the prominent curators in Turkey and surveys how Madra struggled to turn these initiatives into recurring prestigious events. Through an examination of Madra’s work, the article proposes a methodological approach to examine biennials outside of the Global North. The paper surveys the conceptual, spatial, and organizational aspects of two landmark exhibitions in Istanbul and their place in the history of contemporary art in Turkey. The paper inspects the theoretical construction of these inaugural exhibitions to reveal the modernist tendencies in the conceptual framework of the First and the Second İstanbul Biennial (September 25 – November 15, 1987 and September 25 – October 31, 1989). It demonstrates the venues selected for display and examines how the formation of these exhibitions became entangled with the cultural policies. Last, it surveys the role of the Curator and how this role served as a mediator between state agencies as actors that founded or sponsored the exhibitions, and the artists, critics, visitors, who were part of the temporary museum event. It illustrates how biennials are temporary museums that are constructed through power dynamics and how the title ‘Curator’ became a hard‐earned credential in the short history of contemporary art in Turkey. The author offers this example as a template of analysis for understanding the curatorial practices in large – scale exhibitions, both in the ‘center’ and in the ‘periphery’.

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Biennials — Art on a Global Scale

Cited by 16 publications

References 0 publications

Parties, Pavilions and Protests: The Heteronomous World Politics of the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

Parties, Pavilions and Protests: The Heteronomous World Politics of the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

Symbolic Production in the Art Biennial: Making Worlds

A Quest for Curatorial Authority: Beral Madra and The First Two İstanbul Biennials

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