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BY JENS HOFFMANN
The history of the biennial exhibition is welltrodden ground. Emerging during the nineteenth century, at the height of the Industrial
Revolution and Europe’s colonial rule over
large parts of the world, universal exhibitions,
also known as world’s fairs, became showcases for countries to present their latest technological, cultural, and industrial achievements.
Commonly cited as the first instance that inspired all the rest is the
1844 French Industrial Exhibition, which was closely followed by
the Great Exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace in 1851. The latter, organized by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the
Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, exerted an enormous influence
on many aspects of society, in particular education, art, trade, and
further technological advancements in European countries. And it
was seen by an astonishing number of visitors. Around six million
people came to London’s Hyde Park to take in the wonders of the
world, around one third of Britain’s population at that time. Universal exhibitions—or expos, as they have been called more recently—
continue to exist, taking place every few years over the entire last
century. In response to a growing sense of their own outdated-ness
in an era of rapid information exchange, mass travel, and advanced
telecommunications, they are focusing more and more on national branding than on cultural exchange; the latest one, mounted in
Milan in 2015, is indicative of this broader trend.
Inspired by the early world’s fairs, the Venetian city council inaugurated I Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia (1st
International Art Exhibition of the City of Venice), also known as
La Biennale di Venezia (the Venice Biennale), in 1895. Based on the
universal exhibition model of national representations, the
Venice Biennale became increasingly global in scope over the following years, with
the first national pavilions being inaugurated in 1907. It became the archetype and
model for most of the other biennials that emerged throughout the twentieth century, although each would have its own idiosyncrasies, traditions, and ripple effects.
The Bienal de São Paulo, inaugurated in 1951 and the second-oldest
biennial in the world, has had a tremendous impact on the development of art in Brazil and Latin America overall. The beginning of
the Havana Biennial in 1984 marked a shift in the political attitudes
of biennials. Unlike the better-established biennials in the Northern
Hemisphere, the Havana Biennial has dedicated itself to the presentation of art from the so-called margins: Africa, Asia, and Latin
America. The Carnegie International, now seen as a quasi-biennial
exhibition (it is staged every three to five years), was established
in 1896 with the idea that it could help build the collection of the
newly founded Carnegie Institute. The aim, in the words of founder
Andrew Carnegie, was to acquire “the Old Masters of tomorrow.”
Above, top - Opening of the 6th Bienal de São Paulo at Pavilhão da Bienal,
São Paulo, 1961. Courtesy: Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo / Fundação
Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo
Above, bottom - Indignadxs | Occupy, 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary
Art, Berlin, 2012. Photo: © Marcin Kaliński
Opposite - 2nd Bienal de São Paulo, Palácio das Nações / Parque
Ibirapuera, São Paulo, 1953. Second from the left, Francisco Matarazzo
Sobrinho with Juscelino Kubitschek by his side. Foreground - Pablo
Picasso, Guernica, 1937. Courtesy: Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo
The 1990s were inarguably the decade of the international biennial. Literally hundreds of biennials emerged around the world, often
in places otherwise unable to continuously offer access to the latest
trends in modern and contemporary art, due to a lack of museums
or other art infrastructure. The biennial at this time was often described in idealized terms, as the ultimate exhibition model in an
increasingly globalized world. Notable examples were the Johannesburg Biennial (which after two editions in 1995 and 1997 unfortunately ceased to exist), the Istanbul Biennial, the Gwangju Biennale,
the Sharjah Biennial, and the Sydney Biennale. These exhibitions
functioned as large-scale global overviews, allowing audiences to
get an immediate sum-up of recent developments in art from around
the world. The presentations became increasingly diverse, displaying more and more art from the so-called margins and employing
curators from outside the traditional centers. One of their primary
achievements was to rip open a Western-dominated artistic canon,
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questioning long-established political hierarchies and ideological
traditions, and making art truly global and diverse.
Yet given the increasing ubiquity of art fairs (I counted more than
two hundred of them in 2016), with their endless numbers of exhibiting galleries and artists, it could be argued that biennials have lost
their function as places to discover art.
While art fairs operate decidedly in the spectrum of the art market and are rarely
more than commercial affairs—even though many have added curated sections that
offer a more museum-like experience—they are becoming for many audiences the
first place of contact with actual art.
A recent conversation with a curatorial student expressed this dilemma precisely. The student asked me to explain the difference
between documenta (the most prestigious and intellectually ambitious of all large-scale exhibitions) and the Frieze Art Fair. Initially
I thought the student was making a cynical comment on how even
exhibitions like documenta have become commercial, but further
conversation revealed that the student was dead serious and in fact
did not understand the difference between a commercial accumulation of art objects for sale and a curated display of artworks brought
together for educational purposes and intellectual stimulation.
Some biennials are reacting to the massive numbers of art fairs and
biennials by staging self-reflexive exhibition concepts, or by shifting large parts of their activities toward public programs and educational initiatives. An interesting example of this would certainly
be Manifesta 6 in 2006 (organized by Mai Abu ElDahab, Anton Vidokle, and Florian Waldvogel), proposing a temporary school in
Nicosia, Cyprus, which was unfortunately canceled when conflicts
between the Greek and Turkish governments on the island could
not be resolved. The 28th Bienal de São Paulo in 2008, entitled In
Living Contact and curated by Ivo Mesquita and Ana Paula Cohen,
proposed to leave the entire exhibition devoid of artworks and focus
on seminars, conferences, and archives. While the initial idea was
later revised and the final project included a small exhibition on the
third floor of the Oscar Niemeyer-designed Matarazzo Pavilion, the
vast second floor was left entirely empty, partly as a reflection on the
excess of biennials and partly as an expression of resistance vis-à-vis
the political and economic issues of the Bienal de São Paulo itself,
among them severe budget cuts.
Another notable example of a reflexive biennial that in fact never
turned into a biennial is the increasingly visible Bergen Assembly,
taking place every three years in the Norwegian city of Bergen.
Above, top - Thomas Schütte, The Capacity Men, 2005. © Thomas Schütte
The Assembly emerged out of the Bergen Biennial Conference in
by SIAE, Rome, 2017. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Nelson, Paris.
2009, a critical seminar that was set up to investigate the possibility
Background, on the walls - Michael Schmidt, EIN-HEIT (U-NI-TY), 1991-1994.
of establishing a biennial in Bergen. It determined that the AssemCollection Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung, Hannover. Courtesy: the
artist. 4 Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art installation view at KW
bly would be a more flexible and diverse format for the presentation
Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2006. Photo: Uwe Walter
of contemporary art and cultural production than a large-scale exhiAbove, bottom - Kai Althoff and Lutz Braun, Kolten Flynn, 2006, 4 Berlin
bition. In 2015 the 6th Moscow Biennale offered yet another alternaBiennale for Contemporary Art installation view at Office in Plattenbau,
tive to the large-scale presentation of artworks by staging a ten-day
Auguststrasse 44, Berlin, 2006. Courtesy: the artists. Photo: Uwe Walter
gathering offering a wide range of non-exhibition based programs
that looked in particular at the local artistic situation. It became an
example to be followed by many other biennials. Yet another recent
strategy for biennials hoping to stay alive and relevant has been to
hand over the curatorial control to artists. Consider Manifesta 11,
curated by the German artist Christian Jankowski, or the upcoming
15th Istanbul Biennial, to be co-curated by the artistic duo Michael
Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset.
I do not believe, however, that handing over the curatorial reins to artists will serve
as a long-term solution—and perhaps it is not even effective as a short-term marketing stunt.
Given the social and political climate of today’s world, for instance
the wars in the Middle East, climate change, reactionary responses
to the migrant crisis in Western Europe, and the ever-increasing gap
Opposite, top (from left to right) - Jon Rafman, L’Avalée des avalés
between the wealthy elite and the rest of the world’s 99 percent, one
(The Swallower Swallowed) Rhino/Bear, 2016; View of Pariser Platz, 2016;
L’Avalée des avalés (The Swallower Swallowed) Iguana/Sloth, 2016.
might think that there would be enough urgent issues for biennials
9 Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art installation view at Akademie
to engage with. Yet biennials are clearly finding it difficult to keep
der Künste, Pariser Platz, Berlin, 2016. Courtesy: the artist and Future
pace, and it remains to be seen if this exhibition format will survive
Gallery, Berlin. Photo: Timo Ohler
the enormous shifts that have taken place in the art world over the
Opposite, bottom - Markus Muntean and Adi Rosenblum, Where Else, 2000,
last decade, from the dominance of the market to the increasing dig2 Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art installation view at Postfuhramt,
Berlin, 2001. © Jens Liebchen
italization of all aspects of life.
th
th
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Looking at the enormous number of biennials and other large-scale
exhibitions opening in 2017 (documenta, Skulptur Projekte Münster, the biennials in Venice, Istanbul, and Lyon as well as Prospect 4,
to mention only a few) it might be useful, as part of a wider reflection on the state of these types of exhibitions, to look at three
specific examples of innovative approaches to the making of largescale art exhibitions. In the whirlwind of 2016, three particular biennials warrant a closer look for their decidedly different approaches:
the 9th Berlin Biennale, organized by the US-based collective DIS;
the already-mentioned Manifesta 11 in Zurich, curated by the artist
Christian Jankowski; and the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, helmed by
the Brazil-based German curator Jochen Volz.
The Berlin Biennale emerged in the mid-1990s as the brainchild of
Klaus Biesenbach, then director of Berlin’s Kunst-Werke and currently the director of New York’s PS1, within the climate of postWall euphoria. It featured open spaces, borderless and ready for the
formation of a new identity of a reunited Germany and the possibilities this offered for the city of Berlin, which, particularly the
eastern part, attracted literally thousands of artists from around the
world and saw the opening of an almost infinite number of galleries. In 1997 Biesenbach recruited curators Nancy Spector and Hans
Ulrich Obrist to co-organize the first edition with him, and while
chaotic and curatorially confused in comparison to other biennials
around that time, it captured like no subsequent edition a particular sprit, energy, exuberance, and creativity in Berlin’s art scene.
Taking place just before the start of the new millennium, it launched
the international careers of many, and became an important exhibition in the recent history of biennials.
In later editions the Berlin Biennale made a point of appointing curators who had never organized a large-scale exhibition before, for
instance the Colombian curator Juan Gaitán in 2014 and the New
York–based art collective DIS (Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase,
Marco Roso, and David Toro) in 2016. DIS emerged in the socalled post-Internet boom of the 2010s and quickly gained recognition, mostly thanks to its online magazine, which in many ways appeared to be a spoof on other web-based art and fashion journals—a
somewhat superficial fusion of art, fashion, lifestyle products, commerce, consumer culture, and happiness tourism, packaged in the
visual language of advertisements and the strategies of mainstream
marketing campaigns—yet it influenced aesthetic trends in serious
ways, particularly in New York. DIS managed this without ever being particularly explicit about their artistic or political intentions.
The ambiguity of DIS’s project in Berlin, titled The Present in Drag
(perhaps exemplary of the attitude of so many millennials) made
difficult a critical reading, yet it had not come as a surprise when it
was announced that DIS would curate the Berlin Biennale, as the
collective, while vague about their values, seems to represent a different approach to thinking about art and commerce.
Their blurry fusion of artificially formed subcultures seems appropriate in a society
ever more obsessed with the shallow attractions of social media and other contrived digital experiences.
In retrospect it is still unclear whether DIS’s Berlin Biennale was in
fact a critique of “the burnout” of biennials, as the art critic Joshua
Decter called it, or a simple accumulation of quasi-art posturing as
reflections on a post-contemporary world. After visiting the exhibition and feeling somewhat baffled by the lack of coherent arguments,
I took a closer look at the accompanying publication for further
elaboration of what I had just seen, only to realize that the catalogue
was an exact extension of DIS’s generally ambivalent approach.
The 11th iteration of the nomadic biennial Manifesta, which began in
1996 as a pan-European project in Rotterdam responding to the new
social, cultural, and political realities that emerged in the aftermath
of the Cold War, offered a clearer concept than 9th Berlin Biennale.
Under the title What People Do for Money, the exhibition—presented this time in Zurich, one of Europe’s financial capitals—attempted to explore art’s relationship to commerce and labor, and how our
occupations contribute to the formation of identity and social status.
What sounds like a Marxist study on contemporary alienation in a
neoliberal and post-Fordist society was actually a rather playful (at
Above - Manifesta 11 installation view at Helmaus, Zurich, 2016.
© Manifesta 11. Courtesy: International Manifesta Foundation,
Amsterdam. Photo: Wolfgang Traeger
Opposite - Pavillion of Reflections, Manifesta 11 installation view
at Lake Zurich, Zurich, 2016. Courtesy: International Manifesta
Foundation, Amsterdam. Photo: Wolfgang Traeger
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times perhaps slightly oversimplified) investigation into artists’ connections with the realities of everyday work and labor. It was full
of spirited and surprising juxtapositions and historical objects and
artworks, using construction-site scaffolding as the primary display
feature and occupying traditional exhibition spaces. The so-called
“joint ventures” in particular proposed an intriguing, if not always
practical, way of seeing art outside the confines of the white cube.
The “joint ventures” paired artists with other types of professionals living in Zurich—police officers, sewage workers, dentists, firefighters, hotel clerks, personal trainers, cooks, and, appropriately
for Zurich, watchmakers—and invited audiences to see works that
were either made in collaboration by the artists and the non-artists, or made by the artists as a result of their encounters and dialogues. From the perspective of a curator it was interesting to see
how much of Jankowski’s own artistic practice and in particular his
irreverent sense of humor entered into the exhibition. As pointed
out in a number of reviews, it was not intellectually rigorous or eloquent enough to truly take on the complex and historically intense
subjects of economy and labor, and at times it was too naive in its
well-meaning approach, but Manifesta 11 provided an example of
a context-specific exhibition that was personal, political, in many
ways relatable, and never didactic, moralistic, or overbearing in its
critique of the sociopolitical realities of capitalism.
Upon first glance, the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo came across as a traditional, very solidly curated exhibition populated by a now-common mix of younger, undiscovered, or under-recognized artists and
better-known names, centered on a theme—in this case our current
environmental crisis. Yet upon closer inspection, the biennial, entitled Live Uncertainty, offered up a highly convincing model for
a large-scale exhibition that was self-reflexive, presented a wide
range of high-caliber artworks, and engaged critically with the current state of what one could only describe as the possible end of the
world, something that in Brazil feels closer than elsewhere, given its
political and economic collapse, enormous population growth, and
ongoing destruction of its natural resources, from the deforestation
of the Amazon to illegal logging and improper mining practices,
all contributing to extreme environmental and social degradation.
However, this was not an exhibition about Brazil’s precarious state,
but one about the unrelenting acceleration of capitalism and the
global interconnectedness of social and economic developments,
seemingly offering a bleak outlook. Unlike Okwui Enwezor’s 2015
Venice Biennale, All the World’s Futures, which covered similar
ground with enormous pathos (including daily readings from Karl
Marx’s Capital), Live Uncertainty approached these difficult and sensitive issues with humbler and more genuine artistic and curatorial
gestures that did not feel moralizing or superior in their articulation.
Never has the end of the world looked so aesthetically satisfying as
in Jochen Volz’s Bienal de São Paulo.
There are other examples besides these three, such as the magnificent Liverpool Biennial, that seem to indicate that there is still gas
left in the tank of large-scale curated global overview exhibitions.
The survival of biennials and their ilk relies on how effectively they can shed the expectations of city marketing and tourist boards to deliver agreeable and affirming
but ultimately impact-less events, and how readily they can find a new niche within
the wide spectrum of art fairs and expos that are all more or less modeled on the
same principle: to show the latest and greatest the art world has to offer.
The dominance of the art market and the ubiquity of large art fairs
has to be countered with carefully developed exhibition concepts
that critically and precisely formulate distinct curatorial and artistic
visions, engaging with history and today’s realities. Indeed, looking
at the world around us, it seems we might need biennials and triennials with strong messages now more than ever.
Jens Hoffmann is a writer and exhibition maker based in New York and
currently Director of Special Exhibitions and Public Programs at the
Jewish Museum New York. He is Co-Artistic Director of Front International:
Cleveland Triennial of Contemporary Art (2018) and Susanne Feld Hilberry
Senior Curator at Large at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.
Above - Mariana Castillo Deball, Hipótese de uma árvore (Hypothesis
of a Tree), 2016. 32nd Bienal de São Paulo installation view at Bienal
Pavilion, São Paulo, 2016. Photo: Leo Eloy/Estúdio Garagem/ Fundação
Bienal de São Paulo
Opposite - Lays Myrrha, Dois pesos, duas medidas (Double Standard),
2016. 32nd Bienal de São Paulo installation view at Bienal Pavilion, São
Paulo, 2016. Photo: Pedro Ivo Trasferetti / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo