The Seventh Biennial in Havana
The present moment of self-critique and reinvention at the end of a decade which is littered with the debris of the Triennial/Biennial phenomenon has led to some interesting trajectories. One such direction is the choice by Documental! curator Okwui Enwezor (with his team of six curators) to launch a series of discursive sites or 'platforms' beginning this year in Vienna, then New Delhi, the West Indies and Lagos before the main event in Kassel in 2002. Another model is that of the intentionally nomadic and slippery Manifesta which since 1989, in light of the fall of 'the East' (meaning, in this context, European communist rule) has been committed to presenting experimental European work in unexpected 'peripheral' cities. Amidst the international bevy of mega-shows and super-curators, the Havana Biennial offers something rare something located within a cultural and ideological inheritance. Nelson Herrera Y sla, the Director of the 7th Biennial in Havana (and also of the Centro de Arte Contemporaneo Wifredo Lam that organises the event), describes the sixteen year project as 'a modest space for meeting and confrontation'.' Under the theme, One closer to the other, the 7th Biennial was driven by a desire to re-energise intimacy in the midst of world-weary cynicism and excessive, technology- induced stimulation. The Biennial intended to engage in 'communication and dialogue among human beings in the midst of global economic projects and the re-emergence of ethnic, religious and cultural particularisms which seem to increasingly accentuate the differences among the various communities and nations of the world' .2
The Communist Republic of Cuba is the Caribbean's largest and least commercialised island, and Havana is home to around one fifth of its eleven million inhabitants. Throughout... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline