The Cosmic Time of Biennials

Prospect New Orleans, the first biennial¹ – now a triennial – with which I became involved, in 2008, displayed the spirit of urgency befitting the aftermath of the unnatural disaster that was Hurricane Katrina. Instituted following the compounded failures of the FEMA-built levees and of the federal government, Prospect New Orleans was billed by its founding artistic director, Dan Cameron, as an engine of economic redevelopment through cultural tourism. As its first edition’s associate curator and first full-time staff on site, I witnessed the metaphorical might of Mark Bradford’s Mithra, a Noah’s Ark for the Lower Ninth Ward. This neighbourhood also welcomed Sebastian Preece’s infrastructural excavations in Tanto Tiempo, Nari Ward’s spiritual callings in the Diamond Gym: Action Network, and Wangechi Mutu’s domestic mending with Mrs. Sarah’s House. It is in the city’s worst-hit area, a blue-collar African-American community, and in its cultural tradition (on view in Mardi Gras Indian Victor Harris’ retrospective exhibition, which I curated at the New Orleans Museum of Art) that Prospect.1 New Orleans gained its lettres de noblesse as the art world’s first responder. But did it also provide the city’s cultural and artistic first responders a platform from which to amplify the volume of their efforts? A decade later, with the triennial as with the city, the debate has moved from recovery to sustainability, ensuring at least a measure of compatibility between local cultural politics and global artistic credibility.

An exemplary case of cultural diplomacy, the Gwangju Biennale was founded in 1995 to cement its host city’s status as a beacon for democracy after the May 18, 1980 uprising.² As one of the curators of the Position Papers section of Annual Report (the thematic frame of the 2008 Gwangju Biennale under the artistic direction of Okwui Enwezor), I chose to delve back into the city’s momentous democratic history. I did so by mobilising the contemporary student body – as both living archive and heir to the courageous actions of the leaders of the 1980 demonstrations – at the location where their ‘Spring’ had culminated in a march. Now known as the May 18 Democratic Square, it is in fact a large traffic island branching into three main avenues. I used this site – which positions Gwangju’s ‘Spring’ along many other historic insurrectional seasons worldwide, foreshadowing the Arab world’s more recent ‘Spring’³ – as a locus for commemoration of past tests and for projection into democracy’s recent trials in South Korea. There and then, the biennial provided a platform for experimentation into the heretofore seldom used curatorial medium of processional performance, harnessing cultural memories in a mix of re-enactment, carnival, funeral and demonstration that was globally inflected, locally enacted and contextually specific. Festival-like in nature and out-of-the-box by design, directed by expansive political thinkers at best and by cultural provocateurs at times, biennials can support such prospective artistic endeavours.

As a guest curator for the second – and last – edition of CAPE 09, the Cape Town biennial (2009), a research curator for the first – or depending on whom you ask, second, and, by all accounts to date, last – Biennale Bénin (2012), and a member of the curatorial team for the (never inaugurated) Harlem Biennial, I have been supportive of the efforts of national, local and personal biennial initiatives that became short-term ventures. As variously motivated as their founders and supporters, it is these biennials’ deferred desires, rather than their failed attempts, that attest to the ideal and ideological commitments of the biennial field – whether they are liabilities or promises of success. Though they are often economically precarious and sometimes politically challenged, I strongly believe that biennials are as culturally necessary as they have become pervasive. The knowledge biennials produce, at once distinct from and complementary to other forms of cultural production, stretches beyond the scholarship that is often associated with academia and the museum. While the most research-driven and politically-minded biennials mine and contribute to this scholarly field, biennials are also beholden to the reoccurrence of cyclical and thereby cosmic, but also local and therefore quotidian, forms of knowledge production. This interpretation of the biennial phenomenon takes a long historical view on the domestication of art fairs – likewise a growing, recurrent phenomenon – and the secularisation of premodern festivals held with the kind of regularity known to bind humanity then as now. As a curator for the 7^th Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art (2014) under the artistic direction of Stina Edblom and Edi Mukha, I unearthed the city’s largely lost carnival history and the country’s mostly hidden festival tales, creating indoor and outdoor occasions for performance that afforded inward and outward reflections on cosmic time and human memory. My longstanding investment in the reappraisal of the processional exhibition form germane to fairs and festivals of lore may explain why I gain validation from the immediacy of impact that simultaneously stems from, partakes in, and escapes the experience economy. As a curator for the upcoming edition of the Sharjah Biennial (SB14, 2019)⁴, in the city and emirate of Sharjah, I look forward to harnessing the potential of this biennial to ‘leave the echo chamber,’ to paraphrase its title. Biennials have carved out a paradoxical position between heralding trends and trailing fads. Can biennials continue to reflect our transitory era and its cultural crossings? Can they manage to encapsulate and then release a view of the world that is at once more complex, cosmic and empathetic?