OnCurating.org announces an Open Call for proposals to Issue “Contemporary Art Biennials – our hegemonic machines” edited by Ronald Kolb, Shwetal A. Patel, Dorothee Richter.

Please send proposals (max. 300 words) along with a short biographical note (max. 100 words) until 1 March 2020 to: infoon-curating.org

OnCurating.org invites applications from writers, critics, art historians, curators and artists, with this invitation to submit a text related to the development of innovative research in the field of international biennials. The Open Call is eligible to practitioners from around who have links to and a meaningful understanding of the Biennials.
Ten years ago, the conference “The Biennale Principle” took place (25 – 26 June 2010) accompanying the 4th Bucharest Biennale curated by Felix Vogel. The conference explored the assumption of art biennales as “Janus-faced”: On the one hand, Biennials perform to a globalized art market with a homogenizing effect of similar exhibition formats and artists/works, on the other Biennials are rooted in local, regional or national specificities with diverse trajectories acted by various agents in the field. However, biennials are, as Oliver Marchart has remarked, ‘big hegemonic machines’. They make proposals for how to understand the world we live in – locally and globally – and how to be in the world as a subject within a regional and national framework, and how race, class, and gender are positioned.

Biennials are deeply involved in politics of display, politics of sites, politics of transfer and translation and they produce in each single case specific politics of knowledge. Julia Bethwaite and Anni Kangas have analysed that the way in which biennials are scaled is closely related to the question of their politics, i.e. whether and how biennial practices produce and reproduce existing power relations and serve as mechanisms of cultural domination. On the other hand, Biennials in that sense can also become imaginary machines to shape and influence possible futures and offer potential for radical change.

This issue of OnCurating will coincide with the 9th edition of the Bucharest Biennale in 2020, and will also contribute towards a conference analyzing these key questions and position (27–28 June 2020). This issue of the ONCURATING journal is a collaboration between the PhD in Practice in Curating programme at ZHdK and the University of Reading.