Are Biennials the Solution or the Problem for African Art's Global Reach?

Politically, the United States and Europe have become deeply polarized between the forces of globalism and a resurgent, antiglobal nationalism, while contemporary art, by contrast, appears to be riding the waves of globalization with little competition from nationalist holdouts.

Biennials and other large-scale temporary exhibition projects have become the bellwethers of this globalism in the art world. But they have had many outcomes, foreclosing upon one type of aesthetic practice while opening up others to a broader audience. There are well over 200 biennial-style exhibitions held around the world today, many of them in formerly peripheralized locations and quite a few short-lived or sporadic for economic or political reasons.

Initially the international contemporary art found in biennials was primarily from European and North American countries. However, by the 1980s this began to expand, along with the spread of borderless capital, to include the Caribbean, South America, and then Africa, the Islamic world, and Asia. The expansion of the art market has both enlarged and intensified the debate about what "international art" (or its evil twin "biennial art") really is: a currently fashionable style or medium in the major centers of art production? A statement from the periphery against that hegemony? An egalitarian mix of everything? To tease apart these possibilities has been a challenge for both critics and curators.

For some biennials, being in the periphery of the North American and Western European exhibition circuit is a thing to be embraced, not rectified. Many of the "peripheralized" biennials take place in formerly colonized spaces. Theorist Irit Rogoff praises them as "linked peripheries that … bypass the traditional centers of art and culture" (2009: 114).

A more nuanced view was proposed by Okwui Enwezor (2004: 438):

Modernity and modernization mean, relative to globalization, the urge to bring art that has been formerly peripheralized into the centers of international discourse and practice. This, however, does not imply the will to understand these local practices for what they mean in their own cultural spaces.

In contrast to implicitly positive views of biennials, both pro-centrist and pro-periphery, there is the complaint that biennials support neoliberal agendas in their postinstitutional structure as temporary events that have to be constantly reinvented with new curators and artistic directors and therefore are prone to superficiality and subject to ongoing structural amnesia (Gielen 2009: 16).

In another critical opinion, Thomas Fillitz has argued that the global culture of art biennials "does not enhance an egalitarian space of reciprocal flows" (Fillitz 2009: 116). They are instead global contact zones that expose changing global relations (Fillitz 2009: 125) but still remain underneath a European/North American "umbrella" that designates important changes within the field of art: its creation, dissemination, exhibition, and consumption (Van der Grijp and Fillitz 2018).

The most negative view of biennials I've come across was from Bouna Medoune Seye, Senegalese photographer and film producer and author of Les Trottoirs de Dakar (The sidewalks of Dakar), in the exhibition catalog !Flash Afrique! (2001: 87):

All these biennials that were created in Africa—what was the outcome for the artists themselves? Next to nothing … If the artists dash off to the biennials in Dakar or Bamako and buzz about with their invitation cards from one … gallery to the next, then that doesn't do anything for anybody. At best the organizers themselves stand to gain: France doles out some cash, the European Union pays for it, but only those people are promoted who had been favored from the very outset.

These different opinions come from a professor of visual culture at Goldsmiths in London (Rogoff), a well-known Nigerian-American curator and critic (Enwezor), a sociologist in the Arts in Society program at the Fontys School of Fine and Performing Arts, Tilburg (Gielen), a visual anthropologist at the University of Vienna (Fillitz), and a Senegalese photographer and videographer (Bouna Medoune Seye).

The purpose of this Dialogue is to invite further opinion on the subject of biennials from African Arts readers. Preferably these will address one or more of the foregoing opinions, but stand-alone comments are also welcome. Contributions can...