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.
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 Weems, Shirin Neshat, Stan Douglas, Ghada Amer and Alfredo Jaar—many of whom would later become what can be described as “biennial artists.”
Crucially, the exhibition already articulated the defining features of the GNB. These included the centrality of postcolonial, multicultural and globalization discourses addressed primarily to international art audiences; the creation of an international diaspora class of artists and curators largely based in Western metropolitan centers; the predominance of installation, filmic and conceptual practices as the preferred media of “biennial art,” to the detriment of traditional forms such as painting and sculpture; the persistence of the white cube as exhibitionary container; the proliferation of collateral discursive programs—conferences, workshops and talks—featuring a global network of intellectuals; and, finally, a configuration of mixed funding combining public institutions with private foundations, corporate sponsors and cultural agencies.
Dan Cameron, who curated the Istanbul Biennial and Prospect New Orleans, offers a clear formulation of this shift: “I think that the contemporary working model for a contemporary art biennale is the presentation of some form of revisionist take on art history. It can be driven by post-colonial inquiries, or feminism, or any number of different filters, but the underlying premise that we need to revise some of our long-held beliefs related to art is a given.”
When asked about the historical attempts of La Biennale to move from a national pavilion structure toward a thematic, curator-driven structure, Italian art historian Vittoria Martini noted that since the 2003 edition, “it quickly evolved into a polished, corporate-like entity. Looking at the titles from that point onward, one notices that they function as slogans that only superficially suggest coherence. A closer analysis reveals that they are deliberately as abstract, broad, and generic as possible—dealing with grand themes of existence, emotion, and artistic creation—so as to encompass everything,” and, Martini adds, “avoid uncomfortable contemporary urgencies, primarily to prevent diplomatic tensions with participating countries.”
From the outset, the Johannesburg approach was not without its critics. As artist and Third Text editor Rasheed Araeen argued, “The purpose of a biennale anywhere in the world is first to address the needs of its own local or national constituency, its own art community, and if this constituency is not taken into consideration whatever one does will fail.” That said, Araeen added, Okwui Enwezor addressed “the international art community,” which “was very pleased with his performance,” rather than engaging with the urgencies of South African society.
These tensions would be amplified in documenta 11, where the GNB was scaled up and consolidated as a global standard. Structured across five international “platforms” in Vienna, Berlin, New Delhi, St. Lucia and Lagos before the exhibition in Kassel, documenta 11 was curated by Okwui Enwezor together with Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, Susanne Ghez, Octavio Zaya, Sarat Maharaj and Mark Nash. Nonetheless, this apparent decentralization remained largely symbolic, as the exhibition in Kassel retained its role as the primary site of institutional validation and global visibility. If Johannesburg functioned as the testing ground, Kassel marked the moment in which the GNB entered the global assembly line.
More importantly, the internal logic of documenta 11 reproduced the same institutional contradictions already visible in Johannesburg. The predominance of diaspora artists operating within Western metropolitan centers, the reliance on a multicultural curatorial team composed of Western-based and trained curators, the emphasis on installation, film and research-based practices, and the exclusive use of the white cube all reinforced a globally recognizable and easily exportable exhibition model. As George Baker argued, in such exhibitions “reproduction becomes more crucial than production, the container becomes more important than the contained,” producing what he described as “a globalization of the false.” What was presented as a postcolonial rupture functioned, in practice, as a mechanism of standardization: a system in which difference was carefully curated, theorized and circulated within preexisting institutional and market structures. Rather than challenging the conditions of representation, documenta 11 refined them, confirming the Global Neo-Liberal Biennial as a repeatable and scalable format that expanded the biennial model beyond its Eurocentric foundations.
What, then, would a genuinely postcolonial exhibition have required? Not a multicultural team of Western-based, system-assimilated curators and artists, but locally embedded voices capable of articulating their own conditions of visibility. With the resources and institutional authority of documenta 11, this was entirely possible. It simply did not happen. And therein lies, in my view, the great irony of documenta 11.
Vibe-Ennial, from discourse to affect
If Okwui Enwezor transformed the biennial into a discursive platform, the last decade has witnessed a further shift—from discourse to affect. Today’s biennial ecosystem largely operates along two dominant threads: the affective and the identity-based. Both remain curator-driven and thematic, privileging vocabularies of care, healing, resilience and the collective over structural transformation.
The transformation is clearly visible across recent major biennials. Sharjah Biennial 15 (2023), curated by Hoor Al Qasimi under the title “Thinking Historically in the Present,” already translated postcolonial discourse into experiential, spatial and narrative forms rather than articulating it as a critical rupture. This tendency continued in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2025-2026), curated by Nikhil Chopra with HH Art Spaces under the title “For the Time Being,” where the emphasis shifts toward the body, sensory experience and performative presence. A similar logic underpins the 16th Gwangju Biennale (2026), directed by Ho Tzu Nyen with curators Che Kyongfa, Park Gahee and Brian Kuan Wood under the title “You Must Change Your Life,” which foregrounds transformation, lived experience and embodied change as central curatorial propositions. Equally, the 2026 Dakar Biennale, curated by Morad Montazami and titled “(Anti)Fragility: Arts of Repair and Counter-Shock Strategies,” centers explicitly on care, repair, co-creation and resilience.
Ben Davis has captured this shift with precision in relation to the 2026 Whitney Biennial, describing it as part of “the era of the vibe-ennial,” where contemporary exhibitions move “from message to mood.” The exhibition no longer constructs an argument to be read but an atmosphere to be felt. Politics is absorbed into affect. Davis concludes that the show’s “mindset is also not a compromise between the political and the aesthetic,” suggesting that it is “more like a longing to feel whatever can be felt when you don’t believe in either.”
Essentially, this represents the latest mutation of the GNB. The discursive framework inaugurated by Enwezor has been internalized, aestheticized and rearticulated as experience. Critique is softened, translated into emotion and made institutionally legible through participation, immersion and audience engagement. Even in contexts where an alternative paradigm might be expected to emerge—Kochi’s civic grounding, Dakar’s postcolonial principle, Sharjah’s global political positioning or Gwangju’s historical legacy—the same curatorial grammar and institutional approach persists: large-scale, curator-driven, thematic exhibitions designed for global circulation.
Different geographies, same system, same vibe-ennial.
Fairization Syndrome: see it in Venice, buy it in Basel
The convergence between biennials and art fairs is perhaps best captured not by theory but by the art world itself. As Belgian collector and financier Alain Servais told Andrew Goldstein in 2015, the “Venice Biennale is the world’s best art fair,” signaling the exhibition as one of the most effective platforms for acquiring artists and artworks. To assess how far this dynamic has evolved, I returned to Alain Servais, who says that “it is an open secret that biennials are ALSO selling exhibitions largely supported by galleries.” The issue, he adds, is one of opacity, since “this lack of transparency is the real problem,” while “the clear production of value is unfairly absorbed by galleries and art fairs.”
This entanglement between exhibition and market is not a recent development but operationally embedded in the history of the Venice Biennale itself. As Italian scholar Clarissa Ricci has explained, from its inception in 1895 until the effective end of its sales office in 1972—formally closed in 1973—artworks exhibited at the Biennale could be directly sold. Between 1942 and 1972, the official intermediary was the Italian dealer Ettore Gian Ferrari, who charged a 15 percent commission for the Biennale and 2 percent for himself on works he brokered. Art was not only exhibited in Venice, but also systematically traded.
The dismantling of this system must be understood within the broader political and ideological climate of the late 1960s. As Lawrence Alloway observed in The Venice Biennale 1895-1968: From Salon to Goldfish Bowl (1969), the Biennale had already become a highly mediated space of international visibility, networking and influence. The protests of May 1968, with their strong anti-market and anti-institutional stance, directly impacted the Biennale, fueling criticism of its commercial entanglements. At the same time, powerful dealers such as Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend pushed for the closure of the sales office, preferring instead a system in which transactions could be controlled through galleries and private networks. Paradoxically, this anti-market moment coincided with the emergence of the contemporary art fair as a new institutional form, with ART COLOGNE in 1967 and Art Basel in 1970, marking since then a decisive shift in how art would be commercialized and circulated.
This market convergence was not only observed but strategically addressed. Reflecting on the launch of Unlimited at Art Basel in 2000, its former director, Lorenzo A. Rudolf, explicitly framed it as a response to the growing influence of biennials: “Our biggest competitors were suddenly not the other art fairs but the biennials. We had surpassed the other art fairs, but suddenly we saw this phenomenon of the biennial [Venice] turned into a market event; and even if it wasn’t official, next to each artwork you would find the dealer, and he was selling it.” Conceived to attract major collectors—both institutional and private—and to compete with biennials on the same scale, Unlimited appropriated the spatial ambition but not yet the exhibitionary logic traditionally associated with large-scale exhibitions.
What was once organized through a formal sales office has today been displaced into more diffuse but no less effective mechanisms of monetization. Yet this convergence is not without internal tensions. As Servais also observes, biennials are “one of the few places of discovery left,” with “often up to 40 percent of the artists not represented by galleries.”
Chicago-based gallerist Monique Meloche offers a complementary market perspective, noting that “most galleries will increase prices of work around a major biennial,” as “collectors flock first to those artists anointed by the curators and institutions eventually follow suit.” At the same time, she highlights the conditions underpinning this process, pointing to a fundamental imbalance between visibility and resources: “I don’t know if the public understands that being invited to be in a biennial comes with cache but does not come with adequate funding to realize the project.”
What emerges is a structural synergy between the Venice Biennale and Art Basel: the two institutions operate in coordinated succession within the same system of visibility, validation and value.
La Biennale, from origin to global typologies
Several theorists—including Sabine B. Vogel, Caroline A. Jones, Charles Green and Anthony Gardner—have defined the different types of biennials, using criteria that range from organizational structure and chronology to ideological context and geopolitical function. In my book From Roman Feria to Global Art Fair, From Olympia Festival to Neo-Liberal Biennial: On the ‘Biennialization’ of Art Fairs and the ‘Fairization’ of Biennials (2020), I proposed a synthetic division into four broad categories: the experience biennial, the trauma biennial, the resistance biennial and the already discussed Global Neo-Liberal Biennial (GNB). These non-rigid categories help us map the dominant narratives that have shaped the exhibitionary form from the late 19th century to the present.
The experience biennial is exemplified by early large-scale exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale, the São Paulo Biennale and, later, the Sydney Biennale. Its central promise is that of modernity itself: the experience of change, novelty, experimentation and international cultural prestige. The trauma biennial emerges in response to political rupture, war, dictatorship or historical catastrophe, as in the case of Spain’s Bienal Hispanoamericana, documenta, the Gwangju Biennale or the Johannesburg Biennale. The resistance biennial, by contrast, attempts to articulate a counter-model to Eurocentric and hegemonic exhibitionary structures, as seen in the Havana Biennial, the Asia Pacific Triennial and, in different ways, the Dak’Art Biennale.
This typological configuration also allows us to situate more recent debates around the shifting geography of biennials and the emergence of so-called post-Eurocentric frameworks.
A key reference in this debate is Adriano Pedrosa’s article “The Centrality of the Peripheral Biennial,” published in The Exhibitionist (2012), in which he remarked that the “truly relevant biennial today is a phenomenon of the Global South, relying on independence, creativity and ingenuity from its organizers, and drawing crucial connections between different locales and productions,” leading him to argue for their institutional prominence within the global exhibitionary landscape.
This apparent shift in geography finds a partial echo in Cameron’s observation that “the most exciting biennials often happen in slightly atypical cities, like São Paulo, Santa Fe, Havana or Johannesburg, where cultural history also seeps into every part of the experience. It also seems that if you remove the interests of the art market, biennials seem particularly effective in places that value an overview of current developments in global art.”
Still, do these post-Eurocentric biennials challenge and decentralize the Venice/documenta paradigm, or do they reproduce it under different ideological and geographical conditions? Are they genuinely alternative, or are they integrated into—and expanding—the same global system?
Commissioning editor at Phaidon Press, Michele Robecchi, offers a pragmatic assessment of the interaction between the global and the national, noting that “in terms of the tension you describe, I think the meter is firmly in the global zone. The removal of the Italian Pavilion outside of the Giardini area or the absence of Italian artists in the main exhibition this year are proof of that.” At the same time, he acknowledges that “as for the national pavilions, my impression is that it’s still a valid model,” suggesting a structure that persists even as its original balance is increasingly displaced.
This section cannot be concluded without acknowledging the notable absence of Italian artists from the main curated exhibition of La Biennale over the past three decades. Rome-based artist Nicola Verlato—who lived and exhibited for two decades in New York and Los Angeles—suggests that “the Biennale is increasingly less representative of the actual reality of what artists produce today,” as “the criteria by which official curators make their choices are too biased and overlook too many important issues.” In this sense, what appears as global inclusivity may in fact conceal a process that responds to preexisting institutional and curatorial frameworks. As Verlato concludes, “it is also possible… that the Biennale format is now getting completely worn out and that, over time, it will exhaust its purpose and its appeal.”
Post-Eurocentric models, renovation or repetition?
To address these questions, I will look first at five attempts to articulate alternative or counter-hegemonic models in chronological order: the lesser-known Bienal Hispanoamericana (1951), the I Bienal Latinoamericana de São Paulo (1978)—a fascinating and still largely neglected case—the Havana Biennial of 1984, the Dakar Biennale of 1992 and the Asia Pacific Triennial (APT) of 1993.
The I Bienal Hispanoamericana opened in Madrid on October 12, 1951—eight days before the São Paulo Biennale—and brought together more than 2,000 artworks by 923 artists, attracting over 500,000 visitors. By comparison, the first documenta in 1955 exhibited 760 works by 148 artists and received approximately 130,000 visitors, making the Madrid exhibition nearly four times as well attended. The overwhelming majority of participating artists came from Spain and Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America, reflecting the Franco regime’s strategy of reinforcing a transatlantic cultural bloc under the banner of Hispanidad. The biennial saw three editions: Madrid (1951), Havana (1954) and Barcelona (1955-56).
If the Bienal Hispanoamericana reveals the early instrumentalization of the biennial as a geopolitical tool, the I Bienal Latinoamericana de São Paulo (1978), organized also by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, represents a first explicit attempt to construct a regional alternative to the dominant system. Intended to operate in alternating years, it sought to articulate a specifically Latin American perspective at a moment of intense debate around cultural dependency and autonomy. Leading Latin American critics and intellectuals—including Aracy Amaral, Jorge Romero Brest, Gloria Zea and Néstor García Canclini—ultimately rejected the idea of a fully Latin American biennial and instead supported the continuation of São Paulo as an international exhibition aligned with the Venice Biennale system. As leading art critic Juan Acha himself acknowledged, the problem lay in “our mental colonialism or cultural dependency” from Europe and the still-existing fear of “politicization or sociologization of artistic matters,” revealing the difficulty of constructing an autonomous approach outside the North Atlantic canon. The project was never repeated.
A more radical attempt to break with this dependency emerged with the Havana Biennial (1984), conceived by the Centro Wifredo Lam under the direction of Llilian Llanes as an anti-market, anti-colonial and anti-hegemonic platform, initially focused on Latin America and the Caribbean before expanding, from its second edition, to Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Its ambition reached a peak with the Third Havana Biennial (1989), which brought together more than 500 artists (following 806 and 667 in the first two editions) and positioned itself as the most ambitious large-scale exhibition outside the transatlantic axis. As Cuban curator Gerardo Mosquera recalls, the second and third editions were conceived to “present and interconnect the art of what was then called the Third World—what we now refer to as the Global South—as a kind of Salon des Refusés of the international art circuit.” He further adds that the second edition was “the first global exhibition, three years before Magiciens de la terre.” The curatorial structure, however, remained tightly controlled by a small in-house team—besides Mosquera, Llilian Llanes and Nelson Herrera Ysla, alongside a group of young researchers—who determined the selection of artists and the conceptual framework through closed internal processes. However, this collective curatorial configuration reproduced a centralized, top-down system in which decisions were taken without the participation of the very contexts it claimed to represent. In this sense, while Havana succeeded in redefining the geographical scope of the biennial and achieving a truly global ambition, it ultimately replicated the same Eurocentric curatorial authority it sought to contest.
A similar ambition can be observed in the African context, where the Dak’Art Biennale (1992) emerged as a Pan-African platform aimed at repositioning African contemporary art beyond Western institutional mediation and market circuits. Initially focused on artists from the African continent and its diaspora, it sought to construct a postcolonial exhibitionary space grounded in regional specificity and cultural autonomy. However, recent editions point in a different direction. The 2024 edition, directed by Salimata Diop—trained in Paris (Sorbonne) and Warwick, and with a professional trajectory largely developed between London and Paris—already signals a curatorial profile shaped within the Western European and U.S.-based institutional apparatuses. This tendency is reinforced in the 2026 edition under Morad Montazami, whose career is closely tied to institutions such as Tate Modern. What appears as a shift in geography does not imply a transformation of structure: the same curatorial logic, institutional formats and systems of validation persist.
Finally, in the Asia-Pacific region, the Asia Pacific Triennial (APT), organized by the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, was conceived as a regional platform aimed at constructing a counter-axis to Euro-North American centrality. Writing on the occasion of the Third Asia Pacific Triennial in 1999, director Doug Hall remarked on the existing “crisis in the international recognition of so-called peripheral western cultures, including Australia,” while deputy director Caroline Turner described the APT’s “curatorial philosophy of co-curatorship based on equality and mutual respect between Australian, Asian and Pacific art professionals.” However, as Professor Emeritus John Clark has noted, its selection structure “could hardly be regarded as an open system,” since final decisions remained in the hands of an Australian curatorial team. As was the case with the Havana Biennial, here too the result is a familiar contradiction: a discourse of decentralization sustained by a centralized curatorial authority.
Is the Gulf the biennial model’s new frontier?
The Gulf region offers a particularly clear view of how the contemporary biennial philosophy operates. The Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (2021) marked Saudi Arabia’s first large-scale international biennial and a key instrument within its Vision 2030 cultural strategy. The inaugural edition (2021-22), curated by North American curator Philip Tinari, already followed the established global biennial logic, bringing together more than 60 local and international artists. The second edition (2024), titled “After Rain,” was directed by former documenta curator Ute Meta Bauer and supported by an international curatorial team including Wejdan Reda, Rahul Gudipudi, Rose Lejeune and Anca Rujoiu, explicitly framed through global discursive formats and research-based practices. The forthcoming third edition (2026), curated by Nora Razian—formerly at Tate Modern—and Sabih Ahmed, continues this trajectory, with a transnational curatorial team and a thematic conceptualization (“In Interludes and Transitions”) aligned with the language of mobility, transition and global contemporaneity. What emerges is not an alternative institutional mechanism, but a fully articulated iteration of the Global Neo-Liberal Biennial, in which state-driven cultural strategy converges with the established structures of the international Venice/documenta exhibitionary apparatus.
The forthcoming Rubaiya Qatar, a quadrennial scheduled to launch in November 2026, organized by Qatar Museums and staged across multiple venues in Doha, represents the next step in the expansion of large-scale exhibition formats in the Gulf. The inaugural edition, titled “Unruly Waters,” is curated by Tom Eccles, executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College; Ruba Katrib, chief curator at MoMA PS1; Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, formerly at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and now at the Singapore Art Museum; and Mark Rappolt. The composition of this curatorial team—firmly embedded within Euro-American institutional circuits—makes clear that Rubaiya does not emerge outside the existing system but from within its most established nodes. During the press conference, Mark Rappolt acknowledged that the intention behind the inaugural edition was not to “invent anything new.” This admission is revealing—not as an individual position, but as an indication of how curatorial practice operates within an already codified set of frameworks. Rubaiya confirms the continuity of the traditional biennial form at the moment of its geographical expansion: a large-scale, thematic, curator-driven exhibition embedded in global institutional networks and aligned with state cultural strategy.
Initiatives such as Sharjah, Diriyah and Rubaiya differ in their discursive framing, yet they are shaped by the same Euro-American institutional validation systems, networks and curatorial agents. The result is not decentralization, but diversified iterations of the same underlying structure.
The feasibility of an alternative biennial model
After more than three decades of global expansion, the evidence is clear: what has proliferated is not a plurality of formats, but the globalization of a single biennial form. From Venice to Gwangju, from São Paulo to Sharjah, and even in supposedly alternative contexts such as Lagos, Kochi-Muziris or Dakar, the same curatorial actors and frameworks, institutional logics and circuits of validation are reproduced.
The great paradox remains that while scholars and curators have analyzed the global circulation of curatorial practices and the dominance of Euro-North American epistemologies—Paul O’Neill, Terry Smith, Charles Green and Anthony Gardner, Charlotte Bydler, et al.—no one has yet explicitly framed biennials as sites of curatorial outsourcing institutionally equivalent to epistemic outsourcing in academia. In both cases, what circulates globally is the authority to define knowledge or art.
We can conclude that at the turn of the 21st century, the Global Neo-Liberal Biennial (GNB) appeared to signal a moment of institutional renovation, expanding the exhibitionary field through the incorporation of postcolonial discourse, multiculturalism and globalization, and promising a more inclusive and critically engaged art world. More recently, the rise of the vibe-ennial has introduced a new rhetoric of revelation, privileging affect, experience and immersion as pathways toward connection, healing and collective meaning. In spite of this, as this analysis has shown, both moments ultimately converge within the same pattern: what presents itself as renovation and revelation is, in fact, the continuous rearticulation of a system whose underlying conditions remain unchanged. The biennial does not escape repetition; it reproduces it.
The question remains whether an alternative biennial model can exist within an art system that structurally absorbs and standardizes difference. The answer is no.
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