Curating Resistances : Crisis and the limits of the political turn in contemporary art biennials
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Date
27/06/2015Author
Kompatsiaris, Panagiotis
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Abstract
Curating Resistances focuses upon the socially interventionist and activist agendas of
two contemporary art biennials in Europe during and in response to the current
economic crisis. This thesis seeks to untangle their tensions, conflicts and intimate
socialities as they evolve against the backdrop of neoliberalism, austerity, crisis and
the rise of Occupy cultures. Drawing upon primary ethnographic research on the 3rd
Athens Biennale (2011) and the 7th Berlin Biennale (2012), as well as on the
examination of curatorial, journalistic and archival documents, I argue for an approach
that takes into consideration the threefold nature of these sites, as institutions,
organizations and events.
A central area of investigation is the post-1990s curatorial idea of strategically
occupying the institution from within and mobilising it as a space of radical
knowledge production. This idea gave rise to a model of exhibition-making, that I call
the ‘discursive exhibition’, which shapes the vocabulary and forms of curating
cultures at least since documenta X (1997). I argue that this model was challenged
during the European crisis through the post-2010 art activism that brought ideas
related to class, labour and the commons to the centre of debates on art and politics.
Through their attempts to radicalise in response to such challenges, I argue that the
two biennials I examine expose the limits of biennials as sites of activism and political
resistance. In employing the research perspectives of place and translocality, terms
borrowed from cultural geography, I argue that rather than imposing a global art
language, biennials unfold through complex socio-spatial dynamics, manifesting a
remarkable capacity to absorb, remediate and repurpose their surrounding
environments. By discussing how a series of failed statements, border-crossings,
internal conflicts, withdrawals, police interventions and press spectacles interconnect
with the biennial’s organizational and institutional dynamics, this thesis navigates
through the translocal tensions played upon the materiality, infrastructures and
economies of curating resistances.