Bye bye biennale! Who do art and design festivals represent?

The typical syntax for an art and culture festival goes something like this:
The [host location] Biennale [year].
A curatorial tagline, 'Platforming artists from [host location] and the world.'
A curatorial note featuring the words 'catalyst, dialogue, innovative, marginalised, emerging, post-pandemic, urgent, diverse, multi-disciplinary, collaborative, decolonise, inclusive, sustainable futures'
In partnership with a state foundation, a national foundation, a city foundation, and several non-profits.

The origins of large-scale art festivals can be found in organisations and imperial ‘firms’—World Fairs and Salons, Great Exhibitions, Royal Academies—as an exercise in what the kids would now call a 'flex.' These displays of power and influence, a part of the colonial project, took the form of ‘collectables’ showcased to the bourgeoisie, of the host imperial land and its neighbours. The collectables would range from art, artefacts, spices, fabric, metals, stones, and other stolen goods, to people, their language, suffering, experiences, song, dance and philosophy. Exoticised for orientalist projects, the ‘great’ exhibitions were the first encounter that the Western world had with the majority world. The occidental gaze weaves narratives and maps with an impudence that refuses to budge in our view of the world, even our own worlds. Add to this legacy the Industrial Revolution, the 'world' fairs became a billboard for technology. Scientific and industrial demonstrations sat next to exquisite treasures, all for the larger imperial-capitalist project. Meant to placate a society wary of mass production, the expositions were in some ways a large marketing action, nudging a civilisation to trust the machine, more than the human.

The hierarchical structures of museums and galleries embrace, perhaps begrudgingly, the more 'open' format of globally presenting biennales and annual design, art and culture-led festivals. The format offers the artists of these institutions a platform where the audience can interact with the work. From being central, if not the only, gatekeepers of artistic work, these institutions become appendages to the multiple-venue design of biennials, at least for the duration of the event. Museums and galleries are not the only dethroned establishments in the art, design, and culture universe. With the advent of exhibitions, returning with gusto after the sluggish pandemic years, the digital medium finds new reverence. The screen has brought solace, information, solidarity, shock, grief, awareness, collectivism and expression, and has earned its rightful place as the medium of the people. NFTs aside, the digital is hard to ignore and even harder to admonish as inferior.

The Directory of Biennials on the Biennial Foundation maps around 300 biennials across the world. This large number also includes locations in what is deemed the Global South, sparking extensive and new conversations on the role of art, design and culture in society, especially in relation to its 'access.' As one of the key drivers of trend-setting, taste-making, and reimagining beauty and utility, biennials demand to be looked at as a medium in themselves. Bursting out of the seams of confined galleries and museums, artists, designers, and creative practitioners, find an unboundedness in the public-facing format, that allows for a more dynamic and experiential production, as opposed to the more static conditions of institutions. Travelling not just through space but also time, the imperative of context and narrative becomes as crucial to the work as the creative expression of the individual practitioner. The very conditions that a biennial provides for one to consume culture becomes the fertile ground to foster ideas and critiques that are uncontained and robust. It creates the condition for expert commentary and public discourse to coexist and inform each other. Not to mention the visibility and opportunity such festivals bring especially to post-crisis places in ways that not only hold the forces of destruction accountable but also invite material support and solidarity from the rest of the world.

This is not to say that biennials perfectly democratise art. While their milieu of artists can be non-white-male, referred to in the syntax as ‘diverse,' as they like, there is an embedded elitism in these mega-events that is not very different from the origin’s modes of display. Colourful, and luxuriant, the milieux has always been much closer to the fabric of upper-class social life and its modes of meaning and materiality. The current forms too, far from critiquing or disrupting modes of display, enable contemporary versions of social and economic capital. From VIP experiences to private parties, the exclusive guest list is not an uncommon occurrence. Multiple biennials in a particular season often platform the same big names while treating the emerging artists' section as the only variable position of visibility. However, these names whether big or emerging, have in recent times demonstrated solidarity and collective action through open letters, strikes, and withdrawal of work. They also collectively talk to the press or utilise social media, to highlight labour exploitation, sexual misconduct, plagiarism, misuse of funds, and even political hegemony. For a world where the power of a handful rises steadily and steeply, these examples serve as a shot at the most scarce of human resources today, faith in the possibility of change.

This brings to mind American writer, professor, philosopher, and activist, Audre Lorde’s thought-provoking statement: “The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.” In the context of biennials, the master, the house, and the tools are constantly negotiating with each other without doing any real dismantling. There are a plethora of paradoxes that exist in the functioning of biennials and fairs as we know them to be. For instance, when art and design festivals are housed in, or sponsored by the state and foundations notorious for their exploitative and xenophobic operations, how much room does it allow for creative work to be autonomous? Where on one hand we expect art and creative forces to shake up notions of power, challenge the state, and critique the status quo, the artists are also platformed as ambassadors of either their homes, their states or the identities they represent. What then gets prioritised, is the artist a representative, or a truth-teller?

Festivals play a crucial role in negotiating and constructing meanings of place. At the same time, places shape the process of festival-making and artistic production. Cyclical arts festivals transform places from being everyday settings into temporary environments that contribute to the production, processing and consumption of culture, concentrated in a particular place, during a particular time. Moreover, festivals also provide examples of how culture is contested. Promoting art festivals and inadvertently the place, is a formula for platforming ‘safe’ art forms. This highlights latent tensions between festivals as art and economics, between culture and cultural politics.

Design and culture festivals give us the impression that the city and the art are constantly interacting with each other. In reality, we have to wonder how much work that goes into the production of a city-wide exhibition is a result of community-based practices, the locale, and the intricacies that already exist. A key strength of this work is to reveal how interpretive and reflexive approaches within geography lead to a better understanding of how contemporary art can be ‘sensitive to social and spatial contexts,' and how aesthetics add layers of cultural and social meanings.

Going beyond the question of 'where' a festival of art, design and culture is taking place, to the 'why' and 'how' leads us to answers that have little to do with culture and more to do with market forces. Is it then time for biennials to examine its artistic production in the context of its place? Is it time for them to explicitly act 'for' the place rather than do 'to' it? Diverse ideas of cultural identity, global consumption and regurgitation are vital means of cultural production. The lenses and points of enquiry of these examinations contribute greatly to the shaping and reshaping of world views. One of the greatest challenges in the face of the sheer volume of biennials can be the risk of flattening places and their stories, resulting in an ‘unmaking’ of a place. How a place is treated and in turn treats the creative work it houses, even if temporarily, is an exercise in reproduction and representation without reduction. This does raise serval questions such as; in its articulation of regionalism, which often includes internalised colonialism, how does cultural invisibility get produced? Alongside the expansion of the biennial, does criticality get new meanings and voices in the same proportion? What are the ramifications of such meaning-making events in the larger global context? 

Given our constant reckoning with the complex and global phenomenon that are annual fairs, biennials, triennials, quadriennial, and the rhizomatic connections in the world, the impact and influence of art and design on collective cultures become a crucial subject of scrutiny. Can biennials go beyond being spectacular (however modular and repetitive they continue to be at their core) arenas of nationalism and internationalism? Are we risking the flattening of artistic discourse by conflating dualities such as; pluralism with universalism, and globalisation with homogenous public-making? Can grand narratives be criticised for their porosity, while ethical demands are made from the art we consume? Can we truly move to the centre, which is currently still in the margins?

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its Editors.)