Ronald Kolb
Post-Exhibitionary Practice

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https://www.on-curating.org/issue-46-reader/the-curating-of-self-and-others-biennials-as-forms-of-governmental-assemblages.html

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Ronald Kolb, “The Curating of Self and Others—Biennials as Forms of Governmental Assemblages,” pp. 67–75

In: OnCurating, Issue 46: Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines in Times of Emergency
Eds. Ronald Kolb, Shwetal A. Patel & Dorothee Richter
June 2020
ISBN 979-8-6679-7554-0
551 pp.

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The essay proposes reading biennials through Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality rather than through the more familiar lenses of art history or center–periphery critique. Rather than treating biennials as simply caught between spectacle and resistance, or as a straightforward outgrowth of the Venice Biennale model, Kolb argues — building on Tony Bennett’s notion of the „governmental assemblage“ — that biennials function as shifting constellations of political, economic and cultural power that can’t be reduced to fixed categories. Surveying existing scholarly frameworks (from Bydler’s historical phases to Marchart’s hegemony-versus-resistance model), the piece shows how individual biennials routinely defy these binaries, since even a single biennial’s own history can swing between avant-garde experimentation, activist politics and market dominance over time.

The essay closes by turning this theoretical shift into a practical challenge: if biennials are governmental assemblages rather than neutral display formats, then their publics can no longer be treated as passive audiences to educate or regulate, but need to be understood as active participants within that same structure of self-governance. As a working example of what this might look like in practice, Kolb points to the then-emerging alliance between the Prague, Warsaw, Kyiv and Budapest biennials — a solidarity network built on sustainable, self-organized structures rather than national representation.