Biennial Boom: Making Contemporary Art Global

Checa-Gismero, Paloma

ISBN 10: 1478030518 / ISBN 13: 9781478030515

Published by Duke University Press, 2024

Seller Inventory # 398206149

Synopsis:

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.

About the Author: Paloma Checa-Gismero is Assistant Professor of Art History at Swarthmore College.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Biennial Boom: Making Contemporary Art Global
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication Date: 2024
Binding: Soft cover
Condition: New