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This session will investigate the underlying motivations behind this strange case of arithmomania. It will interrogate the discourse of biennialization, which has been dominating debates surrounding contemporary art biennials over the past decade. Biennialization has, particularly within Western academic and professional circles, become a prominent buzzword, conjuring a diversity of associations, connotations and attendant mythologies. One of the characteristics of this discourse is a habitual conflation of the epistemology of biennials with several essentially contested concepts – such as globalization, gentrification or activism – which often leads to association fallacies. The session attempts to identify the latter, as well as other underlying assumptions and the ways in which the arguments made about the biennialization may be flawed or inconsistent with actual developments occurring around the world.

The aim of this session, intended as a polemic, is to provide a selection of most prevalent – and often competing – narratives and viewpoints in order to better understand how arguments about the contemporary biennial are currently framed and illuminate potential, new approaches to the subject.