Indian critic, writer, curator and academic Geeta Kapur wrote in the anthology accompanying the first Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art held in Brisbane,
The point for our purpose is that leading on from a politics of place, whether this be a fishing village, a regional capital, or an undeveloped nation, a potential historical avant-garde is on the agenda. The avant-garde has come from metropolitan cultures like Paris, Berlin and New York, as it has come from developing countries like Mexico, Cuba or Chile; and equally from an alienated and vanguard intelligentsia as from organic intellectuals and artists’ cadres.1
The point for our purpose is that leading on from a politics of place, whether this be a fishing village, a regional capital, or an undeveloped nation, a potential historical avant-garde is on the agenda.
The avant-garde has come from metropolitan cultures like Paris, Berlin and New York, as it has come from developing countries like Mexico, Cuba or Chile; and equally from an alienated and vanguard intelligentsia as from organic intellectuals and artists’ cadres.1
In the twenty-four years since, Kapur’s salient point that an ‘alienated and vanguard intelligentsia’ and ‘organic intellectuals’ can emerge from many other elsewheres has been made apparent over and over again, as interest in art produced outside what she called the ‘metropolitan cultures’ has grown. Over that period, biennales have proliferated alongside a trend for harnessing international perspectives for explaining and containing art. The tendency to collectivise all those local and regional differences into the singular category of ‘the contemporary’ has spread like a contagion, even as evidence of the myriad ‘politics of place’ in each of these biennales unfolds. The Biennial Foundation lists approximately two hundred biennales and triennales worldwide. As Australian academic Christopher McAuliffe has noted, the fact that they are staged in forty-six different countries worldwide can make it ‘difficult to avoid them … almost a quarter of the world’s sovereign states offer one’.2 Yet despite the fact that many critical responses to these events collectivise biennales as a neat one-size-fits-all feature of the global cultural industry, much of the appeal of such events lies... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Raúl Zurita, The Sea of Pain, 2016. Immersive installation with text and seawater. Aspinwall House, Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016.
Alex Seton, Refuge, 2015. Bianca Carrara marble, eyelets, pallet, 110 x 120 x 170cm
