List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
1. Art Biennials: an introduction
Panos Kompatsiaris
PART I: HISTORIES AND SHIFTS
2. Art is not an innocent field: reflection on the borders of the Venice Biennal. Vittoria Martini
3. Turning the Biennale into the BBC: the reform of the Venice Biennale in the post-war Period (1945–1973)
Elisa Bassetto
4. Defining geographies through international art exhibitions in Cold War divided Europe (1955–1959)
Matteo Bertelé
5. An informal offensive: the battle of abstract art in the 5th São Paulo Biennial in 1959
Ana Avelar and Marcella Imparato
6. The 1st Quito Biennial: isolation and power struggles in the Ecuadorian modern art scene during the late sixties
Anamaría Garzón Mantilla
7. Redefining the biennial aims and model: Venice and São Paulo in a shared debate after the outbreak of the crisis (1968-1969)
Anita Orzes
PART II: NATION AND POLICY
8. Exhibiting the nation: framing post-Empire British identity at the Venice Art Biennale
Claudia Di Tosto
9. Art and politics during the cold war: Spain at the São Paulo biennial
Genoveva Tusell
10. The Biennial experience in Mexico: from a nationalist effort to contemporary globalism
Marco Polo Juarez Cruz
11. Between Cultural Diplomacy and Propaganda: Unveiling Saudi Arabia's National Participation at the Venice Biennales
Anastasia Shanaah
12. “Maybe a Biennial Would Come to Town”: Non-Istanbulite Biennials in Turkey
Erdem Çolak
PART III: THE BURGEONING FORMAT
13. Early-Boom Biennials in a Pacified World
Paloma Checa-Gismero
14. Late Soviet Tallinn Print Triennial: International in Form, Regional in Content
Kädi Talvoja
15. Japanese Biennials and Triennials as Art Festivals Embracing Chiiki āto: A Case Study of Setouchi Triennale
Mengfei Pan
16. Biennials of the Arab World: Trans-Arabism as an Attempt at Emancipation from Nationalist Hegemony
Riccardo Legena
17. From Lagoon to Coast: A Critical Analysis of Venice and Dakar Biennials' Organizational Structures and Curatorial Exchanges.
Amarildo Ajasse
18. The Johannesburg Biennales: Chasing a fleeing Shadow
Tabea Maria Brinkmann
PART IV: FORMATS AND INFRASTRUCTURES
19. The Celebrated International Curator: A Key Figure for the Art Biennial
Guillaume Sirois & Samuel Bonneville
20. And every two years, we do it all again…Reflecting on the discursivity and archives of biennials
Gabriela Saenger Silva
21. Assembling assemblies or how public programs do matter in large-scale exhibitions: The case of the Parliament of Bodies during documenta 14
Jasmin Kolkwitz
22. Periodical Mania and Agricultural Models of Publishing in Art Biennials
Camilla Salvaneschi
23. World-Making as a Matter of Scales: A Conversation on the 13th Taipei Biennial
Ting Tsou and Barbara Lutz
PART V: ACTIVISM AND COUNTER-BIENNIALS
24. Istanbul Biennial and the Contested Cultural Sphere in Turkey
Tijen Tunali
25. Biennials as Commons? Uncomfortable Cohabitations in the case of the Athens Biennale 5–6, OMONOIA (2015–2017)
Sevie Tsampalla
26. Entangled biennials as tactical (trans)instituting: Connecting art ecosystems to make new worlds thrive
Chiara De Cesari, Yazan Khalili & Eszter Szakács (IMAGINART)
27. #00Bienal de La Habana: From "Biennials of Resistance" to Biennial Resistivity
Amy Bruce
28. Biennials of Resistance – A View from Kosovo and Some Questions Left Unanswered
Giulia Menegale
29. The First Bienal do Mercosul: Re-Writing the History of Art from the Margins
Camilla Querin
PART VI: PUBLIC SPHERES
30. Documenta, Democracy & the Crisis of Liberalism
Sarah E. James
31. The Kantian legacy in global art exhibitions: between enlightenment and decolonization
Kerstin Winking
32. Trauma, Memory, and Art: Preserving the Spirit of Gwangju through the Biennale
Raymond Rohne
33. Syrcas at Africus: On Maud Sulter, the Johannesburg Biennale and Cultural Extravagance
Nomusa Makhubu and Lucy Steeds
34. An Elephant under the Microscope. The case of the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA)
Sebastian Mühl and Mara Traumane
PART VII: IDENTITY AND POWER
35. From Transition to Extraction: Manifesta’s Nomadic Exhibitions in the Post-socialist Balkans
Dimitra Gkitsa
36. First Class Experience? Art Biennials and Classism
Alessa K. Paluch
37. Magiciens de la Terre: A Biennial That Never Happened
Vesna Madžoski
38. A national pavilion “everywhere”: The female italian pavilion at the 1999 Venice Art Biennale
Greta Boldorini
39. The Politics of Local and Global in Biennials. The Case Study of Manifesta and its 12th Edition
Giulia Pollicita
40. Complicit Cartographies: The Global Biennial Cycle and the Syrian Refugee Crisis, 2015-2018
Eileen P. McKiernan González
PART VIII: EPISTEMOLOGY AND THEORY
41. Documenta fifteen: continuities and ruptures in the epistemic impasse of an art biennial
Giulia Bellinetti
42. Theories of art biennials and globalization: symptom, driving force, world event
Aleksandra Barjaktarević and Paul Buckermann
43. Biennials as administrative hubs of contemporaneity
Clarissa Ricci
44. ‘Out of thin air’: Technology, Liberation, and Absent Labour in New Materialist Biennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art
Natassa Philimonos
45. The Art Biennial as a Hyper Object
Zoran Poposki
46. The exhibition that no one will ever see: the rise (and fall?) of the mega-exhibition format
Bill Balaskas
Biography
Panos Kompatsiaris is an associate professor of media cultures at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University). He holds a PhD in art theory from the University of Edinburgh (2015). His most recent monograph is Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism (2024). He is the founder of Lacuna: Journal of Theory, Culture and Events.
