Biennial Ethnographies Against Biennialization: Place, Translocality and Global Forms

One of the most recurrent and persisting frameworks employed to speak about the phenomenon of art biennials refers to the idea of ‘biennialization’ (e.g. Tang, 2011; Frascina, 2013; Papastergiadis; Martin, 2011; Gardner; Green, 2016). According to this idea, biennials are the most influential engines of artistic globalization, in the sense of propagating, enabling and materialising art’s vocabularies in and across local settings. In this regard, artistic globalisation, i.e. the idea of the expansion and worldwide co-authoring of the field’s codes, is accelerated as biennials multiply as formats for displaying, producing and generating knowledge around contemporary art (Ferguson; Hoegsberg, 2010; Greenberg; Ferguson; Nairne, 1996). The problem with this framework is that it often describes the rise of biennial cultures as an on-going, and often frictionless, state of things. While scholars who employ it, may accept those frictions do exist, especially in the light of centre and periphery debates and the biennial’s internal heterogeneity, it does little to account for the situated complexities through which the biennial unravels as a global but also grounded set of practice, or a “global form” in Aihwa Ong’s and Stephen Collier’s terminology (Ong; Collier, 2005: 11). As an alternative to the numerical privileging of biennialization, this presentation will propose an ethnographic approach - site-specific and contextually sensitive- to study contemporary biennials. It will be focusing on the role and predicament of the biennial ethnographer as these events are staged, performed and articulated as parts of translocal places and their larger socio-temporal dynamics.