Image: 10ª Bienal (1969) – Unknown Photographer. Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

November 26-30,2014 

Auditorio Ibirapuera 

Sao Paulo,Brazil

Directed by:
Charles Esche, Galit Eilat, Nuria Enguita Mayo, Pablo Lafuente, Luiza Proença, Oren Sagiv, and Benjamin Seroussi.

Organized by:
Biennial Foundation
Fundação Bienal de São Paulo
ICCo – Instituto de Cultura Contemporânea

The Forum will run alongside the 31st Bienal de São Paulo
(6 September – 7 December, 2014).

The World Biennial Forum is a gathering of biennial practitioners and appreciators to examine and discuss the foremost topics and concerns within international biennial making and contemporary arts.

The World Biennial Forum’s role is to signal primary concerns in biennial art environments, investigating and researching the various modes of operation and production in different regions, and offering insights into the current issues and needs surrounding art biennials worldwide.

The Forum’s practice is to work as a partnership, hosted first by the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea: World Biennial Forum No 1, ‘Shifting Gravity’, 2012. The World Biennial Forum No 2 will be organized in close collaboration with the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo and ICCo – Instituto de Cultura Contemporânea.

The World Biennial Forum No 2 is a 5-day event, scheduled to take place from November 26 – 30, 2014, during the exhibition period of the 31st Bienal de São Paulo.

Artistic Directors

Charles Esche, Galit Eilat,Nuria Enguita Mayo, Pablo Lafuente, Luiza Proença,Oren Sagiv, and Benjamin Seroussi are developing the program of the World Biennial Forum No 2.

2014 has heralded what seems to be a reawakening of potential in international art biennials. From Istanbul to Sydney and Saint Petersburg, an exhibition form that was threatening to slide into neoliberal conformism has again become the site of conflict and controversy. While the dilemmas of each biennial has its own origins these developments will, in general, bring a renewed engagement in the symbolic value of biennials and the ways they can be contested in public. It is in this spirit of questioning and provoking the concept of the biennial, that the World Biennial Forum No 2 has been assembled.

The World Biennial Forum No 2 will look at the biennial from the point of view of the southern hemisphere. It will concentrate above all on recent biennials in what has come to be termed the ‘Global South’, occasionally taking a broader perspective to investigate how we have arrived here. The main focus will be on the cities of Dakar, Istanbul, Jakarta and São Paulo, where the Forum takes place, but also other southern biennials will come into the picture.

The four focus cities have been staging biennials in different forms over at least the past 20 years, during which time they have invented new traditions and created suitable structures to support and develop them. At a time when the relationship between artistic desire and political will is under negotiation more broadly and biennials are seen simultaneously as both opportunities for harvesting cultural capital and threats to the smooth operation of the status quo, these biennials will serve as the anchor points for a more general discussion about what the potential of biennials is in contemporary times.

Following an evening keynote address from Peter Osborne(Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London) looking at the nature of contemporaneity in art, there will be four sessions over two days of the Forum.

The four sessions are titled:

1. Once Again, as If for the First Time: archives, biennial memory and the balance between continuity and reinvention.

2. No More Imagined Communities: what comes after national art competitions and neoliberal city marketing.

3. Popularity without Populism: education, ideology and exchange.

4. Works and Their Consequences: the role of art and artists and how both address the public.

These sessions will be open to the general public. In addition, workshops will be held for biennial representatives, and trips to other Brazilian cities and their museums will be organized on the last two days of the World Biennial Forum No 2. More information on the participants coming soon.

> via worldbiennialforum.org