Changing Things So Everything Stays the Same

From one edition to the next we progressively offered to share its management or to hand it over to larger groups² aiming not simply for another curatorial perspective (content) but rather for other institutional practices (context). Test-driving well-known ideas around the expanded notion of ‘institutional auto-critique,’³ we opted for uninterrupted operation, concurrently casting each edition’s opening as the climax of certain activities and as the start of a new phase of operation, informed by its predecessor. Our refusal to delegate addressing the antinomies and tensions of producing a biennial to a single curatorial entity and our attempt to develop long-term processes is – in my view – what differentiated the Athens Biennale.

In this respect, far from representing withdrawal or cynicism, my departure from the Athens Biennale was largely informed by the backfiring of the organisation’s once-perceived strengths, namely, its independence from state and municipal cultural policy, its oscillation between biennial institutional perception⁴ and an ethos closer to artist-run, self-organised initiatives (self- governance, un/sustainability⁵ and refusal to be turned into a tool of city branding), and its role in Athens, where debates around the ambivalences of cultural practices in times of abrupt political and socio-economic developments are urgently relevant.

Personal experience aside, my insight stems from the understanding of biennial making as an artistic-institutional practice connected to broader social, economic and political developments. The biennial exhibition is an effective model and an ideal context for working towards social inclusion and political transformation, which necessarily exceeds the duration and artistic purview of each edition. Echoing Lars Bang Larsen and Søren Andreasen’s remark that, “when curators are no longer custodians of eternity, they must reflect on their own institution’s legitimacy,”⁶ two familiar questions fuel my concerns: Are biennials bound to be crudely reduced to a subject or a theme, or could they possibly harbour transformative potential despite their ephemerality? And is it realistic for artists and curators to (still) imagine that they are not complicit⁷ with power?

Biennials stand for a particular genre of art institutions whose subversive potential is constantly eroded by the temporality of the biennial exhibition, the motivations of the guest artistic director(s) and their elective affinity with the agencies that typically initiate, run and fund them. The global recession that started in 2008 undermined the modus operandi of biennials on more than the financial level. The resulting deep funding cuts test biennials’ ability to produce the type of large-scale show they were designed to deliver. The ongoing renunciation of politics on the one hand, and the growing social mistrust of power and its institutional agents on the other, have brought back with great intensity the perception of biennials as neoliberal tokens.⁸

Ultimately, the contradictions between the biennial’s set qualities (such as mobility, inclusion, diversity and discursiveness), structural characteristics (such as temporality, resource mobilisation, funding sources and links to other institutions and authority), and overdetermined curatorial concept statements provide ground for the dismissal of biennials as superficial, suspicious and speculative. Their seeming obliviousness or indifference to the politics of their partner institutions critically crystallises these contradictions. Since 2009, however, biennial participants have been taking these doubtful rhetorics and practices into account, favouring collective work (sharing responsibility/delegating authority), public participation (placing the local community at the forefront⁹) and the creation of shared spaces for conviviality, which are usually named academies, schools, agoras, assemblies, parliaments and so on.

Historically, biennial exhibitions have attempted to manoeuvre between established institutional typologies. Today, the biennial institutional model is emphatically perceived and treated by its stakeholders as a site for social engagement. Yet, there seems to be little possibility to elaborate anything other than curatorial novelty.Biennial exhibitions fail to be sufficiently compelling to present themselves as an alternative to institutionalised practices, and risk becoming largely irrelevant¹⁰ and obsolete. This is a reality they tackle, if at all, more poetically than polemically. That said, it is critical to remember that the short-lived institutional experiments performed in biennial exhibitions have operated, so far, in parallel to the mainstream, and that restoring their challenged legitimacy while “being a beacon of hope” can end up being “a lonely business.”¹¹