It was like a cultural version of Davos, held in the wintry grandeur of central Oslo. For three days, delegates and guests sat in a conference called Oslo Pilot, holding critical discussions about “relational aesthetics” and the role of public art in society.
But really, last November’s event was all about one question: should the Norwegian capital climb aboard the crowded urban bandwagon and host an art biennial?
Oslo is expecting 30% population growth and two major museum re-launches (the Munch and the National) over the next few years. As one of the curators of Oslo Pilot, Per Gunnar Eeg-Tverbakk, says: “Oslo is already rich in culture, with two sculpture parks in a city of just over 600,000.” In which case, what’s the point of having a biennial?
“There’s been an explosion of biennials, triennials and their ilk, and so many cities now have one,” observes Charles Esche, director of Eindhoven’s Van Abbemuseum and a veteran curator of several biennials (most recently, Jakarta). “There seems to be a new one every week.”
Normally a temporary but recurrent exhibition, the every-two-year form is the most prevalent – whether for reasons of practicality or historical precedent. And they are indeed blossoming: from Beijing to Berlin, Taipei to Sao Paulo. Next month, the inaugural Kathmandu Triennale in Nepal will join that list.
So legion are these exhibitions that it’s hard to quantify how many cities now have them, although rough estimates put the total at between 200 to 300 – up from single figures in the 1960s and 70s.
And while biennials have traditionally focused on contemporary art, an increasing number are breaking into sectors such as design and architecture – the connecting idea being that they are a showcase of the cerebral, the avant garde, the bleeding edge.
“A biennial puts your city on the map and it’s great city marketing,” says Rafal Niemojewski of the Biennial Foundation.
Biennials represent a mobilisation of art and visitors; they’re a feel-good moment for cities to connect to a wider network. “People in remote cities can see international, contemporary art without having to travel to New York or Paris,” says Niemojewski, who will shortly depart for the “fourth edition” (to use the jargon) of the Kochi biennale in southern India. “That sense of cultural traffic is a huge incentive.”
Esche dates the biennial boom to the late 1980s: “When the cold war ended, cities across the world started to compete with each other,” he says. This model lives on in the boosterish boilerplate of contemporary biennials: the Toronto biennial, mooted to start this year, is trumpeting “Toronto’s arrival on the international stage as a global visual arts powerhouse”.
Esche says biennials are often driven by local politicians seeking to “circulate symbolic capital” for intangible future gain; and that they’re a “quicker fix” than an “iconic” new museum, with none of the aggravation.
“City councils tend to love them,” says Christian Oxenius of the Institute of Cultural Capital, and author of a paper, Why Cities Need Biennials. “Biennials have become a kind of ‘brand’ in themselves, and they indicate membership of a wider club.”
Also, biennials are unregulated – anyone can host one. There’s no Olympic Committee or (heaven forbid) Fifa equivalent; and bar a couple of observational bodies such as the four-year-old International Biennial Association, there’s no corporate oversight at all. But perhaps that’s their strength.
The locust effect
The first biennial is still the most famous: Venice, born 1895. When it was started by then mayor, Riccardo Selvatico, the Venice biennale hoped to ride the growing move in bourgeois cultural tourism.
“Venice was a promotional tool for the city,” says Esche. “And that aspect has stayed.”
While cultural tourism remains a goal to this day, biennials gradually became freighted with other ideas, including political positioning. “In the 1950s, a few biennials emerged which widened reasons for staging them,” Oxenius says. “For example, in 1951 the Sao Paulo biennial [said to be the second oldest in the world] was founded when Brazil was forming a modern national cultural identity.”
Four years later, Alexandria in Egypt hosted the Biennial of the Mediterranean as a post-colonial message.
As biennials are often seeking a breakthrough in global awareness for their host cities, Niemojewski points out that they often tend to be held in more peripheral cities: “It’s notable that London, Madrid and Paris don’t have biennials but Lyons, Seville and Liverpool do.”
Oxenius suggests another key reason why they’re attractive: “Biennials are relatively cheap – far cheaper than a big sporting event.” And because they are temporary they can bypass planning – yet claim to be a catalyst for change: creating cultural infrastructure just as the Olympics aims to motivate sports in local populations.
Istanbul, which started in 1987 (when it was only the sixth biennial in the world) became a “tool to explain the city anew”, according to Esche. When he worked on Istanbul biennial in 2005, he says it was an opportunity to re-conceptualise Istanbul as a contemporary, cosmopolitan city, rather than the backwards-gazing tourist narrative of Ottoman grandeur.
“As with Istanbul, biennials can be a kind of urban anthropology, even to the extent of taking people to different neighbourhoods, of connecting them,” Esche adds.
At best, art biennials can positively transform our engagement with cities. But there are perceived disadvantages to this phenomenon. They have, for example, been seen as a precursor of gentrification, and there’s also the suggestions that biennials drive a kind of top end, transnational tourism – as if they are a moving playpen for the 10,000 globe-flitting critics, collectors and curators that constitute the international art world.
At worst, biennials are dominated by VIP sections and can become part of a global search for art as a luxury asset – an attitude that sits particularly ill at ease in poorer cities.
“In some contexts they raise a host of complexities,” says James Brett of The Museum of Everything gallery, which focuses on art from beyond the mainstream. He observes that at Dak’Art in Dakar, Senegal, last year, “it did at times look as if a US-EU convoy had landed in Africa”.
Esche has also identified a “locust effect”, whereby biennials come in and eat up a city’s cultural resources. “Then those local big wigs who wanted it in the first place say, ‘We’ve now done contemporary art’ – and it all stops, leaving no money for other cultural projects.”
Another vague criticism is that biennials are losing their cerebral edge, and indulging passive “festivalism” and “spectatorship”. Worst of all, some have been accused of massaging a city’s reputational difficulties.
“The art world has an uncanny ability to go where the money is,” Brett observes wryly. “And that’s true of biennials too. Visiting is sometimes like watching a sophisticated army of curatorial truffle pigs.”
Yet Oxenius believe the biennial model has plenty of life left in it – provided these events work hard to be inclusive, and to engender a sense of place. “My feeling is that biennials can help transform our perceptions of cities, and play an important role in the development of communities,” he says.
So will launching a biennial make people think differently about Oslo? “There are so many hundreds of biennials asking more or less the same things, using more or less the same model,” concedes co-curator Eva González-Sancho, who is hopeful the Norwegian capital will get its new biennial within the next couple of years. “So we will do something different.”
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