Symbolic Production in the Art Biennial: Making Worlds

Abstract

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.

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

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

“…The Venice Biennale is often characterised as a microcosm of Westphalian, statebased geopolitics. It is described as "a sort of Olympic Games of the Art World" (Sheikh, 2010;Sassatelli, 2017), and its national pavilions as "ambassadors" (Vogel, 2010: 8); or it is examined in the framework of national representations and cultural competition among nation-states (e.g. Tang, 2007: 248;Scott, 2003).…”

Situating the “Cultural Reach” of Cities in a Multiscalar Field

“…Critical studies of the politics of biennials draw our attention to the importance of connecting the processes of cultural and artistic production to the dynamics of capital accumulation, without reducing the value produced in and through biennials solely to economic capital. Instead, they relate accruing economic capital through biennials leads to the acquisition of symbolic and political capital and to the interfaces among these three kinds of capital (Sheikh, 2010;Sassatelli, 2017;Bethwaite & Kangas, 2018). Importantly, these studies underline the multiple co-implicated spatialities and scales in their analysis of the politics of such cultural events/productions, especially in relation to the challenges they pose to existing power relations (Bethwaite & Kangas, 2018).…”