Curating Resistances: Ambivalences and Potentials of Contemporary Art Biennials

Communication, Culture & Critique ISSN 1753-9129

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Curating Resistances: Ambivalencesand Potentials of Contemporary ArtBiennials

Panos Kompatsiaris

Ph.D. candidate at School of Art, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

The idea of enabling resistant narratives to neoliberalism through dialogical and participa-tory works, steadily informs the agenda of perennial large-scale exhibitions of contemporaryart (biennials) around Europe and the world. Somewhat paradoxically, the proliferation ofsuch shows since the early 1990s depends on this very neoliberal model that values culture forits measurable outcomes. By discussing such predicaments of the ‘‘biennial phenomenon,’’this article lays out its ambivalences and potentials within the current political–economiccontext. Moreover, through looking at the case of the 7th Berlin Biennale (2012), a contro-versial exhibition that prioritized activism and the ‘‘real effects’’ of art in society, the articlesuggests that such biennial complexities could be better addressed through ethnographicmethodologies.

doi:10.1111/cccr.12039

Large-scale exhibitions of contemporary art are increasingly engaging in explicitextra-visual dialogues with and within the public sphere.1 Most evidently since the2002 Documenta 112 took place across five different platforms around the world, theidea of enabling global and resistant ‘‘knowledge production’’ is steadily informingcontemporary artistic and curatorial practices seeking to denounce self-referentialitywhile proposing a socially dialogical approach to art and exhibition-making (Day,Edwards, & Mabb, 2010; Hlavajova, 2010; Hoskote, 2010; O’Neill, 2007). At the sametime it has been argued that the ‘‘biennial phenomenon,’’ that is, the proliferation ofperiodical large-scale exhibitions around the world since the early 1990s, ‘‘partakesof a capitalist production regime’’ (Dimitrakaki, 2011, p. 307), namely a post-Fordistproduction model, which, among other objectives, prioritizes intercity competitionfor attracting touristic flows via the co-optation and manipulation of esthetic regimesand cultural symbols. Furthermore, there is ongoing debate on how this modelinterpellates subjectivities that need to be virtuosic, entrepreneurial, communicative,

Corresponding author: Panos Kompatsiaris; e-mail: [email protected];[email protected]

76 Communication, Culture & Critique 7 (2014) 76–91 © 2014 International Communication Association

P. Kompatsiaris Curating Resistances in Contemporary Biennials

networked, flexible, canny, and, indeed, career-wise ‘‘successful’’ (Berardi, 2009;Gielen, 2010; Mylonas, 2012; Virno, 2004). In this sense, as parts of a largersocioeconomic arrangement, biennials are ambivalently positioned in their claimedattempts to manufacture liberating ‘‘new worlds.’’3 One must necessarily begin byasking what kinds of worlds are these institutions capable of producing and moreimportantly for whom.

In the past 10 years a growing number of texts on individual ‘‘biennials’’ or‘‘biennial’’ editions have appeared in art magazines or academic journals. These textsprovide accounts of the ‘‘biennial phenomenon’’ bringing together knowledge fromdifferent disciplines ranging from art history, and curatorial studies to visual culture,sociology, and political theory. Recently, the editors of the book Biennial reader (2010)that included most of the major texts on biennials to date, proposed to construct afield of inquiry called ‘‘biennialogy’’ so as to treat ‘‘this contemporary phenomenonas a separate subject of study’’ (p. 16). The editors suggest that systematic studies onbiennials are necessary today, for a contemporary demystification of the autonomyof the artwork and thus for helping us avoid overlooking the crucial ‘‘ideologicaland aesthetic impact of the context, dramaturgy, and discursive armatures thatbring an artwork into public view’’ (p. 17). Taking on board this suggestion, thisarticle discusses the predicaments of the ‘‘biennial phenomenon,’’ laying out itsambivalences and potentials within broader political–economic contexts. Throughlooking at the case of the 7th Berlin Biennale (2012), an exhibition that performs theabove contradictions by operating both as a brand and a proclaimed site of resistance,the article emphasizes the need to problematize such complexities through the use ofethnographic methodologies.

The ‘‘contemporary art biennial’’

Mainly through the success of the Venice Biennale that started operating in 1895,the very word ‘‘biennale’’ has gradually imprinted itself upon the mental landscapeof the artworld and its publics as the periodical site of art display. ‘‘Biennale’’ (orBiennial or Triennial) has been heterogeneously used by a range of periodical artexhibitions proliferating throughout the globe over the last 100 years. While up untilthe early 1990s no more than 10 contemporary biennials operated around the world,now more than 100 of them take place in regular or irregular intervals.4 The sheernumber of these perennial large-scale exhibitions has literally skyrocketed in the past20 years or so. Apart from the increase in their number, contemporary art biennialshave arguably become one of the most notable and celebrated formats for the display,production, as well as for the generation of knowledge around contemporary art(Ferguson & Hoegsberg, 2010; Greenberg, Ferguson, & Nairne, 1996). In the past 2decades, the most celebrated of these such as the Venice Biennale and Documentahave increasingly acted as art ‘‘hubs’’ for establishing the most prominent trendsand discourses within contemporary art fields. At the level of formal display thetemporary, ‘‘event-like’’ structure of the biennial makes it distinct from traditional

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Curating Resistances in Contemporary Biennials P. Kompatsiaris

art institutions such as the gallery and the museum, which usually tend to beassociated with an immutable physical location and thus have the capacity to buildmore enduring ties with the places in which they occur. The biennial can changelocation between editions, can take up different formats of display, and can generallybe more experimental and daring.

The contemporary biennial , though, can hardly be theorized as a homogenousphenomenon; it largely consists of heterogeneous projects, significantly varying interms of funding, aims, visibility, politics, and economic and cultural contexts.However, there are some common attributes that these types of shows share. First,they are committed to a cosmopolitan perspective combined with a desire to articulatethe artistic and cultural particularisms of their host cities, an attribute that turns theminto agents of what has been termed as ‘‘glocalization’’ (De Duve, 2007). Second,in contrast to the ‘‘art fair,’’ which is the more commercial format of recurrentcontemporary art shows, the biennial is financed by public or private sources thatare usually not directly dependent on art investors (Basualdo, 2010). Therefore, thecontemporary biennial has a more ‘‘public’’ character than the art fair and thus agreater potential to include formats of art display not exclusively destined to sell, suchas large-scale installations, video installations, ephemeral art projects, and generallyworks of an interdisciplinary nature. Apart from this, the biennials in contrast tomost art fairs are usually grounded upon a concept or an idea that is expected tobe communicated by the curator(s). (Tang, 2011). Accordingly, biennials largelydepend on the figure of the curator for delivering these ideas. The curator, who caneven be seen as a ‘‘recent reincarnation of the model of the independent intellectual’’(Basualdo, 2010), is regarded as the main ‘‘author’’ of the event. This time though,curators are not the authorial figures that possess ‘‘supposed authorial primacy’’over the rest of the participants that take part in a show. The curator is primarilya ‘‘cultural mediator’’ pertaining to the ‘‘organization of emerging and open-endedcultural encounter, exchange and enactment’’ (O’ Neil & Wilson, 2010, p. 19).

Spaces of capital and hope?

When attached to a specific art show the word ‘‘biennial’’ promises a priori symboliccapital—primarily granted via the success of Venice Biennale—through whichorganizers gain the legitimacy needed to address sponsors, artists, volunteers, thepublic, and so on. In turn, each specific ‘‘biennial’’ or ‘‘triennial’’ is perceived by itsorganizers as a ‘‘brand’’ that cultivates its particular and differentiated brand identity,its particular ‘‘soul,’’ effect, trace, and signature, that have to be made more or lessclearly recognizable to respective audiences or ‘‘niche markets’’ through the course oftime. ‘‘Success’’ then is measured according to how successfully the individual biennialhas positioned itself within the larger ‘‘biennial field,’’ that is to say into the cognitionof artists, art critics, journalists, audiences, and so on. Funders are principallyoperating within the paradigm of ‘‘creative cities,’’ the more ‘‘successful’’ the festivalbecomes the more firmly it is expected to enable touristic flows to respective localities,



make sponsoring firms look more ‘‘creative’’ and ‘‘caring,’’ boost the economic valueof the local art’s scene and further integrate it in a global art circuit.

Nevertheless, as Simon Sheikh has recently noted, apart from ‘‘spaces of capital,’’biennials are also ‘‘spaces of hope’’ (2010, p. 163). In the last decade several biennialeditions aligned themselves with the most critical sides of the contemporary artworld(Day et al., 2010), embracing an attempt to ‘‘politicize culture’’ (Lafouente, 2009),engaging in a practice of exhibition-making that prioritizes critical educational andemancipatory practices (Rogoff, 2009). This takes place against a political backgroundthat as O’Neil and Wilson put it, is ‘‘increasingly dominated by rhetorics of culture-as service, knowledge production, the creative economy, immaterial labour andeducational outcomes’’ (2010, p. 14). In this regard, several grandiose statementshave been made regarding the emancipatory/political potential of such shows. Variouscurators and scholars have seen biennials as apparatuses capable of transformingin one way or another aspects of contemporary social life; capable for example ofintroducing ‘‘into the public debate political themes’’ (Marchant, 2010, p. 467),creating ‘‘new public formations that are not bound to the nation-state or theart-world’’ (Sheikh, 2010, p. 157), nurturing an ‘‘agonistic repoliticization of culturallabour’’ (Hlavajova, 2010, p. 293), or even being a ‘‘force for the breakdown of classdistinctions’’ (Basualdo, 2010, p. 133).

The biennials as agents of critical discourses

Along these latter lines, curatorial practice and theory have recently prioritized therole of the contemporary art exhibition as a site where critical educational discoursescan circulate, a process described by O’Neil and Wilson as the ‘‘educational turn’’ incontemporary art (O’Neill & Wilson, 2010).5 This turn understands the exhibitionspace not merely as a site for art display, but principally as a discursive space, where artdisplay becomes part of a broader ‘‘knowledge production,’’ with lectures, seminars,publications, tour guides, and discussion platforms performing a central ratherthan supportive role in relation to the show (O’Neill & Wilson, 2010). Discussions,symposia, talks, extensive publications, and educational programs have become inthe past decade the ‘‘main event’’ in exhibition practice (O’Neill & Wilson, 2010,p. 12). The recent leaning toward exhibiting works of art with a documentary,journalistic, or archival nature (Cramerotti, 2009) signifies such an endeavor togenerate discursive meanings that expand into social reality. For example, the desireof 2012 Bucharest Biennale to become ‘‘a form of agency within the city’’6 is verycharacteristic in conceiving the exhibition space as an expanded discursive agent withan interventionist function in society.

Along with this tendency toward education, a parallel trend has also been madevisible in contemporary art discourse since the end of the 1990s: a drive to discovera ‘‘new emancipatory potential’’ through the articulations of cultural producers, apotential capable of pointing toward new ontologies that aspire to decenter ‘‘thecommon capitalocentric vision’’ (von Osten, 2010, p. 7), or as Mark Fisher has recently



put it the ‘‘business ontology’’ (Fisher, 2009), which largely informs the mentalframework of neoliberalism.7 Such politicization was made evident in art’s alignmentto a growing dissatisfaction as it was expressed in the antiglobalization movementwith the postcommunist neoliberal consensus in Europe and to a neocommunistrevival in political theory that was specifically felt in the artworld through thepublication of Hardt’s and Negri’s Empire (2000).

In fact, the last decade has seen several editions of contemporary art biennialsconceiving themselves as educational laboratories and sites where discursive anddialogical models come to be tightly connected with political utterances mostusually articulated in opposition to the dominant neoliberal hegemonic orders. FromDocumenta 11 in 2002 that critically dealt with postcolonialism to the 11th IstanbulBiennial in 2009, which attempted to politically mobilize the process of exhibition-making, a range of biennials have combined the tendency toward discursivity with theinstigation of political encounters, crystallizing within the field of contemporary art asDay et al. put it, ‘‘an anti-neoliberal structure of feeling’’ (Day et al., 2010, p. 148). Thiskind of militancy taking place in biennials is additionally vitalized within the contextof the current financial crisis in Europe, where a sense of urgency for being politicallyrelevant and not ‘‘neutral’’ seems to dominate their programmatic statements.

For instance, the third Athens Biennale wishes to ‘‘transform the biennale intoa sit-in and a gathering of collectives, political organizations and citizens involvedin the transformation of society, an invitation to create a political moment ratherthan stage a political spectacle.’’8 In turn, the curator of the 7th Berlin BiennaleArtur Zmijewski calls the invited artists to ‘‘identify their political positions’’ anddescribe what they are doing as artists ‘‘also in pure political terms.’’9 The 12thIstanbul Biennale seeks to ‘‘explore the relationship between art and politics, focusingon works that are both formally innovative and politically outspoken,’’10 while the2012 Manifesta edition focuses ‘‘on aesthetic responses to the worldwide ‘economicrestructuring’ of the productive system in the early 21st century.’’11

Funding criticality

Yet, biennials and other cultural institutions are not only autonomous agentsof various discourses, they have to come up with sustainable economic models,something that requires organizing their internal relations of production and findingways to secure funding within the increasingly dominating neoliberal cultural policiesthat are employed across Europe and the world. This process most usually entailsa respective ‘‘adjustment’’ of some of their statements or practices. Even when theypursue criticality, they also need to demonstrate their role as city promoters or assites where networking and portfolio-career building are reproduced in order tosomehow engage with the necessary capital flows. If not, they run the risk of losingparts of their economic support or go bankrupt. If they decide to operate as socialcritics, they usually have to bear in mind that their critique should not disturb orpush the limits to the extreme.



As Dimitrakaki (2003) and Lesage (2007) have suggested Documenta 11, which iscommonly regarded as the archetype of the politically engaged art show, in practicedepended on an ‘‘availability of a surplus labour force for showcasing its critique’’(Dimitrakaki, 2003, p. 154) and ‘‘did not result in a type of organization that matchedits discursive counter-thoughts’’ (Lesage, 2007, p. 94). This type of conflictingattitude is crucial to highlight not only for biennials but also for a whole range ofother contemporary cultural institutions and practices within creative economiesthat draw their legacy from or employ certain modes of critical discourse. It hasbeen argued that practices that recourse to criticality but still engage with neoliberaleconomic models and procedures, provide the lifeblood of contemporary capitalismin that they neutralize and institutionalize a mode of critique that owes its legacyto May 68 and the countercultures of the ‘‘60’’ (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005—seeespecially their criticism against ‘‘artistic critique’’ as a means for consolidating a‘‘soft,’’ culturally sensitive capitalist ideology; Gielen, 2010; Hardt, 2011). On theother hand, critique has to unarguably engage in processes of instituting in orderto transform existing patterns of thought and action.12 The question then to beanswered for curators and critics is how this can be done, what tactics can beemployed and questions be raised toward that direction, always within the givenparticular conditions and limitations of specific individual cases (Hlavajova, 2010).

Since the 1970s, according to Christian Marrazi (2011), the very concept of capitalaccumulation has been transformed within the productive paradigm of post-Fordismdue to the incapacity of Fordism to drain surplus value from the ‘‘immediate livinglabour, the wage labour of the factory’’ (Marrazi, 2011, p. 248; see also Berardi,2009). In Fordism, the extraction of surplus value was mainly circumscribed tothe production site, while in post-Fordist processes of accumulation it becomesincreasingly diffused in the sphere of circulation and reproduction of capital, that is,financial, touristic, and cultural sector. Since the displacement of traditional industrialunits, the setting in motion of investments and the seeking of valorization in collectivedesire (Berardi, 2009; Pasquinelli, 2008) has been capital’s response to the problem ofgrowth. From this point of view, the biennial proliferation can be seen as concomitantnot only with the expansion of experience economies, the ongoing economizationof creativity, the expansion of culture-driven regeneration projects, which haveenormously increased the past 30 years, but also with the ever increasing mobility ofcapital, goods, people, and deterritorialized information and communication flows.

In this sense, cultural festivals, exhibitions or fairs usually come to be regarded ‘‘asvehicles of economic generation or as ‘‘quick fix’’ solutions to city image problems’’(Quinn, 2005, p. 927) for their funding bodies. Accordingly, cultural policies inEurope increasingly tend to focus on economic growth as a measure of artistic value13

and certain social and cultural issues related to these festivals are usually droppedfrom the agenda, such as participation, democracy, education, or the civic potential(Quinn, 2005). In this context, an art event bears the promise of adding symboliccapital to respective locales and of turning previously industrialized downtown zonesto attractive business opportunities for retail investors and real-estate developers.



The operation of a biennial is usually understood by state and private sponsorswithin such frameworks.14 It has been demonstrated how such culture-led regen-eration schemes contribute to the gentrification of ‘‘deprived’’ areas, a process thatinvolves the displacement of less privileged classes and the dislocation of traditionalcommunities (Smith & LeFaivre, 1984; Tretter, 2009; Zukin, 1987; Zukin, 1988). Themobilization of cultural production for urban revitalization schemes are advanta-geous for real-estate developers and private investors who, as Gray puts it, transform‘‘elements of cultural distinctiveness into ‘fixed capital’’’ (2010, p. 37). Thus, it isusually a process with strong class characteristics as it dispossesses poorer populationsfrom their communities in order to open up ways for business. As it has been shown,artistic production has often inadvertently played a significant role and contributedin such procedures in different cities around the world with prominent examples NewYork, Berlin, and Barcelona (Ley, 2003; Deutsche and Ryan, 1984; Zukin, 1988).15

Biennials as workplaces

Unlike the much-debated subject of art and rent speculation discussed above, alargely neglected issue in debates on contemporary art and biennials is the conditionof artistic and cultural labor.16 The status of artistic labor has been mainly tackledoutside official institutions, by networked cultural worker collectives and activistcultural groups that have emerged in the last decade or so, such as the London-based‘‘Carrotsworkers Collective’’ and ‘‘Precarious Workers Brigade,’’ the Paris-based‘‘Coordination des intermittents et precaires,’’ and the New York based ‘‘W.A.G.E.’’(Working Artists and the Greater Economy). The basic consensus in such groups isthat, as Carrotsworkers Collective puts it, ‘‘free labour, internships, volunteer work’’are not a separate sphere of activity but a necessary ‘‘condition of late capitalistcultural economy.’’17 Especially recently, as the ‘‘Occupy’’ movement has spread,the exploitative practices in the artworld is a main theme in the agenda of variouscollectives claiming to represent the majority of artists and creative workers, whostruggle to make a living within the field, the largely invisible mass of culturalworkers that provides the conditions of possibility of celebrated art to take place(Sholette, 2010).18 Groups such as the newly formed collective ‘‘ArtLeaks,’’ followingthe Wikileaks practice, call to draw attention to leaked abuses concerning artisticwork, underscoring the

precarious condition of cultural workers and the necessity for sustained protestagainst the appropriation of politically engaged art, culture and theory byinstitutions embedded in a tight mesh of capital and power.19

Such discussions are usually excluded in official biennial programs, as themajority of these events often rely on the voluntary or underpaid labor of theparticipants. Volunteerism in the official artworld is mostly career-oriented and isdifferent than volunteerism in more horizontalized structures based on prefigurativepolitics and voluntary associations, where the participants have a potentially more



equal relationship with each other. In large-scale spectacular events, it is usually thefew who decide and maintain their authority, while on the other hand there is usuallya mass of unpaid volunteers and interns who strive to enter the world of artisticrecognition as a promise to ‘‘be part of the action.’’ Such logics tend to exclude in thelong-term lower socioeconomic classes from art production, as creative producerswith alternative sources of income will much easier pursue a career in the sector.20

As a matter of fact, contemporary biennials often use a language derived froma neoliberal vocabulary. Volunteering positions that reproduce a class-based careertrajectory are often advertised as a ‘‘unique opportunity of interacting with establishedartists, professionals, local and international visitors,’’21 or a ‘‘fantastic opportunityto be part of a major international art event.’’22 This is often problematic for artinstitutions that aspire to a social and political relevance distinct from that of artmarket competition. One could also suggest that this type of language, based on thecult of the creative personality who despite personal turmoil eventually ‘‘makes itto the top,’’ impoverishes the collaborative potential that the word ‘‘volunteerism’’implies. In fact as Lorey (2009, p. 197) notes, cultural producers, due to the belief oftheir own freedom and autonomy, are so prone to exploitation that they are almostpresented by the state as ‘‘role models’’ or ‘‘model entrepreneurs,’’23 forecasting theongoing process of casualization of all work that is currently becoming predominantall across Europe (Gielen, 2010; Ross, 2009).24

Engagement with activist politics: ‘‘Forget Fear’’ in 7th Berlin Biennale

Apart from theoretical and curatorial accounts that see biennials as stages for enablingradical politics, the complexities regarding their role are often addressed in dismissiveterms. In their article, ‘‘Event and Counter-Event: The Political Economy of theIstanbul Biennial and Its Excesses’’ (Harutyunyan, Aras, & Goodfield, 2011) on theexplicitly politicized 11th Istanbul Biennial (2009), Harutyunyan et al. argue thatdespite all the Brechtian rhetoric on liberation and emancipation that the curators ofthe show mobilized, the event remains a capitalist spectacle that serves to validate thespecific interests of its sponsors, such as the multinational giants Koc and Turkcell.Their view holds in short that effective political action must take place outside an eventsuch as a biennial, as the latter due to the structural affinities with neoliberal modesof development, post-Fordist work paradigms and the institutionalized, conservativeartworld is unable to weaken the system. For the authors, such contradictions betweenthe ideological and economic conditions of the biennial, as well as the postideologicalparadigm in which the biennial functions ultimately hinder any convincing potentialof emancipatory politics. For them, the streets and self-organized initiatives are theplaces where real ruptures in hegemonic order can be enacted as they are able toforge new social relations and practices from below.

However penetrating, such a view fosters a fatalistic conception of political andsocial relations that overlooks the particularities of social interaction. If we think ofthe constitution of the social as ontologically contingent, contradictory, and diverse



(Mouffe, 1988), the encounter with or the participation in cultural manifestationsof whatever kind is capable of enabling different significations for audiences andparticipants, the effects of which cannot be exhausted in the agendas of their sponsors.I argue here that from the perspective of social sciences these complexities couldbe better understood through thorough and enduring examinations of the relationsbetween subjects and objects in the sites they appear and their conceptualizationswithin larger configurations of meaning. To manifest my point, I will discuss how suchcomplexities could be better understood by addressing questions more familiar toethnographic research (Siegenthaler, 2013) within a biennial setting that attemptedto activate ‘‘the streets’’ within its actual space. Rather than arriving at definiteconclusions about the ‘‘biennial phenomenon,’’ through this example, I wish to openup a series of enquires for informing future research in the field.

The 7th Berlin Biennale took place from April 29 to July 1, 2012. KW, its mainvenue and hosting institution, is located in Auguststrasse in Berlin Mitte, an area fullof commercial art galleries, where processes of gentrification and rent speculationhave been functioning smoothly since the unification of Germany. Presenting ahyper-politically engaged exhibition in such a privileged area seemed already acontradiction in terms.

Titled ‘‘Forget Fear,’’ the exhibition held an explicit political-activist agenda thatstirred up public debate and controversies both in Berlin and abroad. The curatorialteam avoided the usual practice of implementing an overloaded theoretical discoursefor framing the artistic content, returning, as the cocurator Joanna Warsa puts it,to ‘‘action and non-knowledge.’’25 This was only partially true, as the educationalprogram of the Berlin Biennial was in reality far from limited, with numerous panels,seminars, conferences, and symposia. The difference to other biennials was thatinstead of inviting world famous philosophers and social scientists, the curator ArturZmijewski and cocurator Joanna Warsa chose to involve activists, activist artists,or groups active in a struggle for social change. The curators deliberately choseto include actors normally excluded from the institutionalized artworld , tacklingthe issue of artistic labor, institutional structures and symbolic fees, pointing outexplicitly among other things that, ‘‘the biennale, whether we like it or not, is a formof artistic exploitation’’ (Zmijewski, 2012).26

In a nutshell, the main curatorial strategy can be described as follows: Thecuratorial team essentially attempted to use the anticipated possibility of noncen-sorship, freedom, and autonomy that the category of art enjoys in Western liberalsocieties, in order to offer visibility and material support to excluded or repressedindividuals, collectives, and institutions. This included works and cases that have beeneither subordinated to state censorship, such as the censored exhibition ‘‘UkrainianBody’’ in Kiev, state oppression such as the artist/activist groups Voina, and PussyRiot in Russia, or are committed in one way or another to struggles for social change,such as the ‘‘Berlin Occupy’’ movement. Works exhibited in the Biennale range fromdirect agit-prop, such as Marina’s Naprushkina’s newspaper Self-Governing thatopposes Luckashenko’s oppressive government in Belarus, to controversial pieces



targeting official German history, such as Martin Zet’s Germany gets rid of it, wherethe artist calls Germans to get rid of Thilo Sarrazin’s infamous best-seller GermanyDoes Away with Itself . The curators chose also to give visibility to cases like thePalestinian struggle for statehood through the display of the ‘‘Palestinian Key ofReturn’’ that symbolizes freedom for Palestine, the ‘‘Jewish Renaissance Movement’’that calls for a return of 3.3 million expatriated Jews to Poland and to the victims ofthe drug-wars in Mexico. In many occasions the interested groups were physicallypresent in the Biennial space. In this sense the 7th Berlin Biennale expanded its scopebeyond the traditional artworld to nonartistic actors, such as contemporary activistgroups and marginalized communities.

A characteristic work that illuminates the curatorial practice was New WorldSummit by Jonas Staal. For the work, the artist and his collaborators invited fora 2-day summit various representatives and political spokesmen of organizationsthat are designated as terrorist by international terrorist lists so as to open updemocratic debate and give visibility to the issue. During the summit, the speakerswere surrounded by flags of so-called terrorist organizations, many of which wereprohibited from public display in Germany. As a researcher who closely workedwith the project informed me, it would be very difficult to realize such a meetingwithout the institutional support of Berlin Biennale. Despite the controversies, thework gave the physical stage and voice to an otherwise homogenized social groupin public imagination, the so-called terrorist organizations. In a similar fashion, thecurators decided to provide the main space of KW Institute to the recently evictedand disempowered ‘‘Occupy Berlin.’’ The goal on behalf of the curatorial team wasto strengthen and position within the activist map the Berlin branch of the Occupymovement through its financing and visibility, as well as to create a space wherethe movement could exchange knowledge, skills and information with the Spanish‘‘Indignados’’ and activists from all over the world. In this way, spectatorship washoped to be turned into active participation. The presence of the Occupy Berlin in theBiennale space created rippling effects to the institution that organized the show. Forexample, with the initiative of the activists, assemblies were held with the exhibitionworkers and curators in order to negotiate working conditions in KW, wages andequality in decision making. Despite all the largely valid criticisms and complaintsfor the movement’s institutionalization and neutralization by the Biennale, most ofthe participants in the Occupy Berlin that I talked with, who were themselves activelyinvolved throughout the duration of the Biennale, felt that the movement was indeedstrengthened and reorganized.

In the last decades, contemporary art as a field of action has become significantlysocialized and nontechnical so as to often merge or overlap with that of politicalactivism. Here, this merging is expressed within Berlin Biennale, a dominant playerin the configuration of trends and discourses in the global art world. The eventdemonstrates that the binary opposition that Harutyunyan et al set up between, onthe one hand capitalist circuits and their overdetermining effects on exhibition’smeanings, and on the other hand ‘‘the streets’’ is a weak explanatory framework for



examining these types of shows. An analysis of the often conflicting institutionallogics present in the exhibition space such as in the case of the Berlin Biennale, i.e. ofthe curatorial team, the German Cultural Foundation and BMW as sponsors, OccupyBerlin, artists and the so-called terrorist groups demands a research method attentiveto and able to account for the ways that such logics are transformed, contested,affirmed or compromised through their encounters. The decision of the GermanCultural Foundation to threaten to stop funding during the preparation of the showin fear that it would be a ‘‘political catastrophe,’’ as a tour guide of the exhibition putit, is a good case in point for thinking through these conflicting logics.

In this sense, the curatorial approach and the relations it staged complicatesa straightforward analysis of the show that will either dismiss it as a ‘‘‘capitalistspectacle’’’ or see it as a potential stage for radical politics. I would argue that itsextremity and complicatedness raises questions as to how biennials and similar eventsshould be approached from a scholarly perspective in general. Some questions thatcould illuminate the ambivalences and potentials of the biennial in relation to itscondition as both a proclaimed site of resistance and a brand could be the following:How are the social values and scripts of contemporary art understood by thoseinvolved in these settings, the workers, the artists, the activists and the general public?How does the larger social context, whether physical or symbolic, interact and shapepossibilities and expectations of public intervention? How do the discourses on socialchange, anti-capitalism and pedagogy inflict a specific mode of understanding andbeing within these settings? What kinds of new worlds are produced within suchsettings and for whom are these worlds potentially valuable? Through systematicengagements with their dynamic and transient modes of being, these questions canadvance an understanding of biennials as translocal spheres of action (Nelund, 2013).As far as they account for the particularities of social interaction, ethnographicapproaches on contemporary art institutions can shed light on constellations ofdiscourses, practices and interpretations that largely remain obscured in prevalentart historical or theoretical narratives.

Notes

1 ‘‘Extra visual’’ here refers to a practice of exhibition-making that does not principallyfocus on the visual qualities of the show, but moves beyond them to employ discussions,publications, guide tours, seminars, symposia, and so on.

2 Following Niemojewski (2010) ‘‘contemporary art biennial’’ here will signify the city orregion-specific ‘‘large-scale international survey show of contemporary art that recurs atregular intervals but not necessarily biannually’’ (p. 92). Documenta, therefore, whichoccurs every 5 years, as well as triennials that occur every 3 years, are included under theumbrella name ‘‘biennial.’’

3 See Venice Biennale, 2009, ‘‘Making Worlds,’’ http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/archive/exhibition/.

4 Source http://www.biennialfoundation.org/.



5 For more material on the educational turn and knowledge production in contemporaryart and curating, see O’Neil and Wilson (O’Neill & Wilson, 2010), E-Flux 14. RetrievedMarch 2010, from http://www.e-flux.com/journal/issue/14.

6 See http://www.bucharestbiennale.org/concept.html.7 As ‘‘knowledge economy’’ and ‘‘lifelong learning’’ demand more and more education,

certain contemporary art institutions and projects, from the A.C.A.D.E.M.Y. project(2006) to the BAK institution in Utrecht and the ‘‘Copenhagen Free University,’’responded to the call by attempting to radicalize the content of their educational practice(O’Neill & Wilson, 2010). The rationale goes that since knowledge and creativity areincorporated in the economic cycle of post-Fordism in the form of labor, they should atleast be employed for producing critical discourses and militant resistances.

8 See http://www.athensbiennial.org/AB/en/ENintro.htm.9 See http://www.berlinbiennale.de/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategor

y&id=189&Itemid=253.10 See http://bienal.iksv.org/en/archive/newsarchive/p/1/327.11 See http://manifesta9.org/en/manifesta-9/concept.12 This is a recurrent tension that time and again appears in discussions concerning forms

of critical cultural production and which in curatorial terms is very much addressed inwhat is known as ‘‘New Institutionalism.’’ ‘‘New Institutionalism’’ has been a popularbuzzword during the 2000s in contemporary art curatorial discourse. It expresses a willto critically reengage with art institutions like biennials, art fairs and galleries, in order totransform them from within. According to Claire Doherty, New Institutionalism‘‘classifies effectively a field of curatorial practice, institutional reform and critical debateconcerned with the transformation of art institutions from within. New Institutionalismis characterized by the rhetoric of temporary / transient encounters, states of flux andopen-endedness’’ (2004, p. 1).

13 See for instance, http://ec.europa.eu/culture/creative-europe/documents/communication_en.pdf.

14 Murray Whyte, a Canadian newspaper visual arts writer, in his 2009 article ‘‘WhyKitchener-Waterloo Has a Biennial, but Toronto Does Not,’’ understands the need for abiennial for Toronto in similar way: From an economic development point of view,that’s the advantage of biennials: They’re on for extended periods of time, so you canreally leverage them as tourist events . . . just having a biennial is a flag firmly planted inthe community that says, loud and clear: Art matters here.’’ http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/686996

15 See, for example, David Ley’s article ‘‘Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field ofGentrification’’ (Ley, 2003) for the role of artists as agents in contributing tothe gentrification of areas in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, also ‘‘The Fine Art ofGentrification’’ (1984) by Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan for the role of artistsin gentrifying New York’s Lower Eastern Side, Sharon Zukin’s Loft Living: Culture andCapital in Urban Change (Zukin, 1988), as well as the manifesto from Hamburg‘‘Jammin the Gentrification Machine’’ by Not In Our Name! http://www.signandsight.com/features/1961.html.

16 In the past 10 years there has seen a significant body of literature generated in thesociology of labor regarding the nature of cultural and creative work mostly in mediaindustries (Beck, 2003; Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2010; Huws, 2006–2007; McRobbie,2002, 2004; Ross, 2009). These accounts most usually describe cultural labor as



self-fulfilling and self-rewarding, low-paid, nonunionized, and highly flexible.Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2010) have further identified cultural work as extremelycompetitive, with large amounts of young people willing to work for free.

17 See http://carrotworkers.wordpress.com/on-free-labour/.18 See for instance the collective Occupy Art Basel: ‘‘We represent the people who can

barely afford the entry fee to see the art at Art Basel, let alone make an offer on theirfavorite art piece. We are the 99% who can’t afford to buy this art. We are the peoplewho install the art, transport the art, guard the art, dress up and sit behind a desk and tryto sell the art for their bosses. We are the countless artists who haven’t made it into ArtBasel, into the art commodity marketplace. We are the countless craftspeople who helpmake this art or exclusively produce this art on the instructions of the artists. We are thecountless art lovers who read about art, study art, appreciate art, need art around all thetime, but don’t have the cash to own it.’’ http://www.occupyartbasel.com/about

19 See http://art-leaks.org/about/.20 The consequences of the lack of social diversity in contemporary art has recently been

noted in relation to art education after the pronounced cuts in public spending in theEnglish higher education sector by the current British government that in the long termwill mostly affect people from lower classes (Beagles, 2010; Bishop, 2011).

21 See, for example, Singapore Biennial http://www.biennialfoundation.org/2010/11/600-volunteers-and-interns-needed-for-singapore-biennale-2011/.

22 See, for example, Dublin Contemporary, http://www.biennialfoundation.org/2011/06/dublin-contemporary-is-looking-for-volunteers/.

23 See ‘‘Organic Intellectual Work: Interview With Andrew Ross’’ (2009),http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/geert/interview-with-andrew-ross/.

24 In a recent talk Italy’s PM Mario Monti advised young people to forget about life-timejobs. http://schirachreport.com/index.php/2012/02/02/italian-prime-minister-monti-tells-young-people-to-be-flexible-and-forget-about-life-time-jobs-the-young-respond-that-they-want-job-security-risk-averse-italy-will-never-grow-fast/

25 See http://uninomade.org/berlin-biennale-7/.26 See http://artnews.org/berlinbiennale/?exi=33388.

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Curating Resistances: Ambivalences and Potentials of Contemporary Art Biennials

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