In Biennial Boom, Paloma Checa-Gismero traces an archeology of contemporary art biennials to uncover the processes that prompted these exhibitions to become the global art world’s defining events at the end of the twentieth century. Returning to the early post-Cold War years, Checa-Gismero examines the early iterations of three well-known biennials at the borders of North Atlantic liberalism: the Bienal de La Habana, inSITE, and Manifesta. She draws on archival and oral history fieldwork in Cuba, Mexico, the US/Mexico borderlands, and the Netherlands, showing how these biennials reflected a post-Cold War optimism for a pacified world by which artistic and knowledge production would help mend social, political, and cultural divisions. Checa-Gismero argues that, in reflecting this optimism, biennials facilitated the conversion of subaltern aesthetic genealogies into forms that were legible to a nascent cosmopolitan global elite—all under the pretense of cultural exchange. By outlining how early biennials set the basis for what is now recognized as “global contemporary art,” Checa-Gismero intervenes in previous accounts of the contemporary art world in order to better understand how it became the exclusionary, rarified institution of today.
- Cover
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Gallery
- Biennial Conversions at the Borders of Liberalism: An Introduction
- Part 1: Anticolonial Collaboration in the Bienal de La Habana’s Early Iterations: Havana, 1984–1991
- 1. Polyphonic Internationalism
- 2. Curating the Third World
- 3. An Aesthetics of Production
- Part 2: Cosmopolitan Dreams at the US-Mexico Borderlands in inSITE94 and INSITE97: San Diego and Tijuana, 1994–1997
- 4. Sovereignty Claims over the Borderlands
- 5. Fears of Provincialism and the Desire to Be Global
- 6. Globalizing Mexican Art
- Part 3: Art for a Unified Europe: Manifesta 1, Rotterdam, 1996
- 7. Manifesta: Placenta Europa
- 8. Curating Conflict
- 9. The Art of Belonging
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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