27–28 June 2020
Organiser
Bucharest (Online)
Co-organiser with Dorothee Richter, ZHdK
presented alongside the ninth Bucharest Biennale curated by Henk Slager
27–28 June 2020
The online conference alongside 9th Bucharest Biennalec was supported by Goethe Institut and ProHelvetia.
Presentations by Vasyl Cherepanyn (Head of the Visual Culture Research Center / Kyiv Biennial), Ekaterina Degot (Steirischer Herbst), Patrick Flores (Singapore Biennale 2019), Martin Guinard (Taipei Biennale), Răzvan Ion (Spinnwerk Vienna & Bucharest Biennale), Ioana Leca (Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art), Yung Ma (11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale), Oliver Marchart (political theorist), Sarah Owens (ZHdK), Shwetal A. Patel (The Kochi—Muziris Biennale), Nora Sternfeld (Documenta Professor), Farid Rakun (Ruangrupa, Documenta fifteen), Roma Jam Session Art Kollektiv (RJSaK), Mirjam Varadinis (Kunsthaus Zürich, Manifesta Palermo), Farah Wardani (Jakarta Biennale), Beat Wyss (Art Historian).
The online conference Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines in States of Emergency, held alongside the ninth Bucharest Biennale on 27–28 June 2020, critically examined biennials as influential cultural and political infrastructures. Taking Oliver Marchart’s description of biennials as “hegemonic machines” as its starting point, the conference addressed their politics of display, knowledge production, representation, translation, and participation. It considered both their entanglement with colonial histories, market forces, and structural inequalities and their potential to sustain international exchange, critical debate, and alternative visions of the future during states of emergency.
The conference was organised by Dorothee Richter and Ronald Kolb and accompanied by OnCurating, Issue 46: Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines, co-edited by Ronald Kolb, Shwetal A. Patel, and Dorothee Richter. The publication combined contributions from conference speakers with texts selected through an international open call on new research into contemporary biennials.