The globalization of art and the ‘Biennials of Resistance’: a history of the biennials from the periphery

Peripheral contexts of artistic creativity: the Angolan case

“…Contrary to the optimism of some analysts (Marchart, 2014), the contexts of artistic production continue to reproduce the current asymmetries in the world economy and in the international system, so that, akin to economies and states, such contexts can be classified as central, peripheral and possibly semi-peripheral 1 . The Angolan artistic context, object of the present paper, is, following this nomenclature, peripheral.…”

Southeast Asian biennales

“…On contrast, in Southeast Asia, several biennales emerged from the need to promote unrepresented art from the centers of production (against state-promoted art). This counter model, which has been called "biennales of resistance" (Marchart , 2014) and can be related to the Salon des Refusés of 19 th Paris, has a wide expression in the region to this day. According to Oliver Marchart, biennales of resistance (of which the Habana Biennale is an important example) anticipated developments that have now migrated to the biennales of the center: abolishment of nationalities, extinction of prizes, and integration of diasporic artists living in the West in the shows (Marchart, 2014: 267).…”

“…When considering biennales, scholars distribute them in two groups: 1) those that follow the tradition of 19 th century shows and are associated with the phenomenon of 'biennialization' (Gardner;Green, 2016;Jones, 2010: 68) 9 and 2) those that provide with a counter model to this tendency, and have been named 'biennales of resistance' (Marchart, 2014). The first relate to what Gardner and Green suggest that in an Asian context is a direct consequence of the AAS, APT and many other biennales that were formed in Asian since -namely Taiwan (1992), Gwangju (1995) and Shanghai (1996).…”

Assembling and disassembling

“…Biennials between boycott and counter-hegemony in the second decade of the 21st century "An important shift happened towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century," claim Anthony Gardner and Charles Green: "biennials became self-conscious" Green, 2014: 28). As a result, biennials now address their own character as "hegemonic machines," as political theorist Oliver Marchart has called them (Marchart, 2014: 2), discussing their political and economic entanglements, but also their scope for action within these structures. Biennials today thus understand and describe themselves as sites of intervention in neoliberal conditions of which they themselves are part, addressing these conditions in critical terms while also fueling and fostering them.…”

“…Many other examples from before 1989 could be named, showing that biennials played an important role not only for the West, but also for transnational formations running counter to the West's definitions of the world (formations that always saw themselves as more than just "the rest"). In this context, Oliver Marchart (2014) speaks of "biennials of resistance". But unlike Marchart, I would call the Havana Biennale (whose early editions in the 1980s he discusses in detail) not the first global biennial, but rather the last of the Third World biennials.…”