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Established in 1895, the Venice Biennale is one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in the world, playing a pivotal role in shaping the canon of Art History, as well as instrumental in state/nation-formation and legitimation. The increased visibility of underrepresented countries or regions are engendering new and critical discourses. This session includes three case studies from Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe that explore the intersections of the geography of contemporary art, the ideology, technology, and bureaucracy of global exhibitions, and the curatorial aspirations and national crises from the political to the moral. The case study on the Philippines investigates its official participation through the production and exhibition of Filipino contemporary art in 1964 and 2015, noting how the Venice Biennale served as an international form of cultural development and diplomacy, as well as sustained government corruption. The case study on the South African Pavilion in 2019 explores the curatorial strategy of presenting the themes of social, political, and economic resilience in South Africa, particularly how artists articulate the uneasy discourse on citizenship, rights, and social justice in the post-apartheid era. Finally, the case study on the Romanian Pavilion addresses the 2005 and 2019 participations, and how these may be considered as alter-historiographic exercises meant to investigate the function of exhibitions as a counter-hegemonic art historical practice. Symptomatic of late/neo capitalism, transnational aesthetics, and/or localized global spectacles, the session builds a complex understanding of the production, performance, commodification, consumption, and corruption of/in contemporary art aptly crystallized at the Venice Biennale.