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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02 Nov 2016

India’s Biennale Effect: A politics of contemporary art

Edited by Robert E. D’Souza, Sunil Manghani

This book is more than a source for ‘India’s first biennale’. It is a thoughtful, revisionist consideration of the received accounts of ‘biennale culture’, as it has been articulated in The Biennale Reader, and by writers such as Hans Belting, Jacques Rancière, and Nicholas Mirzoeff.
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04 Aug 2016

Rethinking the Biennale Model in The New Curator

The New Curator by Natasha Hoare, Coline Milliard, Rafal Niemojewski, Ben Borthwick and Jonathan Watkins

This book presents a snapshot of the most interesting curatorial practices in the art world today. There is an emphasis on the “now”: the introduction sketches in the development of curatorial practices since the 1980s but the shows under scrutiny in the following 25 case studies have all taken place in the last few years.
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