The Politics of Display: Collateral Events and Pavilions at the Venice Biennale
School of Art History, University of St Andrews, November 24, 2017
Deadline: Apr 24, 2017
During the late 1990s, the structure of the Venice Biennale underwent a dramatic overhaul, expanding into the Arsenale buildings that once housed the city’s shipyards and armouries. Its interconnecting rooms provide a counterpoint to the Giardini’s national pavilions, and the greater curatorial fluidity that this enables has been further extended through the introduction of collateral pavilions and events. These now proliferate throughout the Biennale, offering sites through which artists and curators can explore the charged issues of transnationalism, resurgent nationalism, and globalization. As was particularly evident in Okwui Enwezor’s 2015 Biennale, these interventions can resonate strongly with both Venice’s long history of maritime trading, and the current challenges it faces as a city inhabited primarily by tourists, in a continent struggling to respond coherently to the on-going refugee crisis, with an ecology that has been tangibly affected by climate change. While critics rightly continue to challenge the out-dated nature of the Biennale’s underlying structures, its vast expenditure and excess, and its imbrication in commercial markets, it is now an expanded and contested field of activity, in which the politics of representation and display are constant and highly charged. Continue reading “CFP: Collateral Events and Pavilions at the Venice Biennale (St. Andrews, 24 Nov 17)” →
