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Global Art Biennials: Renovation, Revelation—or Repetition?

In an increasingly saturated biennial landscape, long-established and newly founded exhibitions promise institutional change while embracing the rhetoric of care, affect and experiential immersion. But do these shifting discourses and formats signal genuine transformation or merely disguise repetition?

Recent controversies surrounding major biennials suggest that these exhibitions are anything but neutral cultural platforms. The 2022 edition of documenta, curated by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa, triggered a national crisis in Germany following accusations of antisemitism. The recent 61st Venice Biennale also faced geopolitical tensions triggered by a “Statement of Intention” issued by its international jury, which announced it would”refrain from the consideration of those countries whose leaders are currently charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.” This position deepened the crisis because the jury—curators Solange Farkas, Zoe Butt, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Marta Kuzma and art historian Giovanna Zapperi—assumed the authority to introduce geopolitical criteria of inclusion and exclusion while still operating within the nation-state pavilion mechanism that they neither controlled nor could fundamentally transform.

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Ongoing debates, such as the April 2026 Artforum thematic cluster on biennials, have focused on a series of pressing but ultimately symptomatic issues. Among the opinions, Daniel Birnbaum’s stood out, reflecting on the biennial as an exhibitionary form shaped by conditions of “global fatigue,” while Michelle Grabner examined the tension between global curatorial ambition and local civic expectations and Adam Szymczyk addressed the limits of political agency within large-scale exhibitions. Taken together, these accounts diagnosed the visible tensions affecting biennials today, but leave largely unexamined the deeper invisible structural conditions that have historically shaped the format.

Troubled times, troubled waters

These episodes surrounding documenta and the Venice Biennale—the two most influential platforms of the global exhibitionary system—reveal the biennial as a state-driven apparatus through which contemporary conflicts are staged, contested and legitimized. This is not new. From the earliest Venice Biennale (1895), shaped by the ideology of world fairs, national prestige and fierce cultural competition between European powers, to documenta (1955), conceived as an instrument of postwar rehabilitation and Cold War cultural alignment within the Western bloc, biennials have consistently—and surprisingly—emerged in moments of political instability while simultaneously serving as tools of soft power.

This pattern extends across different international contexts. Both the São Paulo Biennale (1951) and the Bienal Hispanoamericana (1951), promoted by the Spanish dictator Franco, were deeply embedded in Cold War cultural diplomacy. Later examples—from the Havana Biennial (1984), associated with the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Gwangju Biennale (1995), rooted in the country’s democratic transition—demonstrate how biennials have been mobilized within broader political and ideological mechanisms.

A comparable dynamic can also be observed in the United States, albeit under different institutional structures. The Whitney Biennial (1932), founded during the Great Depression, differs from later initiatives such as Greater New York (2000) and the New Museum Triennial (2009), which were conceived to support emerging artists. Organized by museums rather than as international platforms, they nonetheless remain subject to political pressure, as demonstrated by recurring controversies—from Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2017) to Gaza protests during the 2024 edition.

In other words, biennials do not simply reflect moments of crisis; they are produced by them and, in turn, help to manage their cultural visibility.

The biennialization of the world

Political tensions aside, the past three decades have witnessed an extraordinary proliferation of biennials. Why has the biennial format become so dominant and so attractive to art professionals, corporate managers and politicians alike?

Part of the answer lies in the format’s systemic flexibility. Unlike museums, biennials are temporary, adaptable and relatively low-risk. This helps explain why Istanbul, where industrialist Dr. Nejat Eczacıbaşı and the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts were decisive in launching the Istanbul Biennial (1987), or Sharjah, where the Al Qasimi family transformed the Sharjah Biennial (1993) into a cornerstone of its cultural infrastructure, embraced the model so effectively. More recently, initiatives such as the Diriyah Biennale (2021) in Saudi Arabia and the Bukhara Biennial (2025) in Uzbekistan show how it can be used to reposition regions within the global art system without the long-term commitments required by museums.

At the same time, biennials operate within a powerful symbolic economy. Events such as the Venice Biennale or documenta confer a level of prestige that art fairs rarely achieve, even as fairs like Art Basel dominate the commercial sphere. Biennials thus occupy a strategic middle ground: less commercial than fairs, more spectacular and media-visible than traditional museum exhibitions.

For curators, the biennial marks a decisive shift in power, beginning with Harald Szeemann’s direction of documenta 5 (1972), which established the curator as author, and later transformed by Okwui Enwezor’s documenta 11 (2002), which redefined the curator as a political activist. Since then, a transnational curatorial class—figures such as Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hoor Al Qasimi, Massimiliano Gioni and Mami Kataoka—has reinforced the biennial as a space where curatorial authorship shapes artistic narratives. As artist and curator Michelle Grabner notes, “biennials tend to succeed publicly when there is something for everyone: representations of the local, regional, national and international work; a mix of poetics and politics; painting alongside the digital.”

However, this dynamic has also contributed to the emergence of what German art critic Sabine B. Vogel described in 2010 in Biennials—Art on a Global Scale as a form of “biennial art,” characterized by large-scale installations, research-based practices and a globally circulating exhibition model. In conversation with Vogel, she bluntly observed: “The impact of biennials on society, on thinking or opening up for my tolerance or anything like this is 0. It’s just soft power for the governments to show their openness.”

By contrast, Brazilian independent curator Diana Lima, co-curator of the 35th São Paulo Biennial, suggests that it is still possible to rethink the biennial as a site of political and social intervention. As she explains, “One of the most important elements of my curatorial practice has been to examine how racial and colonial violence has already made Brazil inevitably global.” She further underscores that “Art has not only been a place to express and address those questions symbolically, but also on an ethical level. A dimension that is able to demand that we embrace responsibility for issues of social justice and reparations, particularly considering the art system as a place where we can claim participation in the redistribution of value within the economic system.”

Ultimately, the biennial is forced to reconcile a series of apparent contradictions: it is at once local and global, political and aesthetic, critical and institutional, temporary and perennial. Its success, however, comes at the cost of a growing sense of saturation. As ArtReview editor Mark Rappolt noted in his review of the 59th Venice Biennale, such large-scale exhibitions often generate “too much to see; too much to parse; too much to process in one sitting.”

The Global Neo-Liberal Biennial (GNB)

The shift toward what I defined back in 2020 as the Global Neo-Liberal Biennial (GNB) begins not in Kassel but in Johannesburg. The 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, Trade Routes: History and Geography (1997), directed by Okwui Enwezor, marked a decisive turning point in the reconfiguration of large-scale exhibitions after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Conceived as a platform to reintegrate South Africa into the global cultural system, the exhibition foregrounded themes of postcolonialism, multiculturalism and globalization.

To construct a truly international exhibition, Enwezor assembled a multicultural curatorial team composed of Western-based, trained curators, including Hou Hanru, Yu Yeon, Octavio Zaya, Kellie Jones, Gerardo Mosquera and Colin Richards. This “collective authorial curatorship” turned curators themselves into visible agents of authorship and branding, establishing a framework that would become standard in subsequent biennials. At the same time, the exhibition brought together a large roster of international and diaspora artists—among them Hans Haacke, Isaac Julien, Mona Hatoum, William Kentridge, Yinka Shonibare, Carrie Mae........

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