27 Sep 2020

From Official to Unscrupulous: The Havana Biennial and #00Bienal de La Habana

by Amy Bruce

A larger history of biennials risks establishing an edition in relation to a narrative of historical progress that could negate a particular institutional and local biennial history. The concern of this paper is the consideration of how contemporary biennial editions impact institutional biennial historiographies, given that biennials are an exhibition format that are continually negotiating with the present.
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07 Dec 2016

Biennials: Four Fundamentals, Many Variations

by Terry Smith

When we look back at the century plus history of recurrent survey exhibitions of contemporary art––those we call biennials, triennials, and (at Kassel, itself expanding) documentas––we can see that they slowly established a set of distinctive protocols, that were formalized during the 1980s, then rapidly replicated throughout the world, while at the same time steadily increasing in size and scope.
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