PASS: Journal of the International Biennial Association

06/25/2021

Looking ahead to the 2nd Thailand Biennale, curator Yuko Hasegawa revisits her curatorship of biennials in Istanbul, Sharjah, and Moscow.

Yuko Hasegawa, İstanbul Bienali, Sharjah Art Foundation, Thailand Biennale, Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, , , , , , , , , , ,

PASS is a public program of the International Biennial Association.

Looking ahead to the 2nd Thailand Biennale, curator Yuko Hasegawa revisits her curatorship of biennials in Istanbul, Sharjah, and Moscow.

03/22/2021

Coming Soon! Tokyo-based curator Yuko Hasegawa retraces her biennial trajectory from Istanbul through Sharjah and Moscow to Korat.

İstanbul Bienali
Sharjah Art Foundation
Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art
Thailand Biennale

PASS is a public program of the International Biennial Association

03/14/2021

"The challenge for any biennial seeking to be critically engaged is to offer more than reflection, to invent means for proposition and challenge and to be adaptable in form and function in order to transmit the potency that art and ideas possess."

Read more about Nav Haq's case study of Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA) 2017.

📷: , "Citizen" (video stills), 2017. Two-channel HD film, wooden oars, framed archival inkjet print. 312 minutes.

ShirupaGupta Studio
PASS is a public program of International Biennial Association

Revisiting "WheredoIendandyoubegin-On Secularity" Nav Haq notes that the challenge for critically engaged biennials is to transmit the potency that art and ideas possess.

03/06/2021

In her recent essay, theorist Denise Ferreira da Silva presents a pressing challenge to biennials. Noting that “biennials and triennials are often explicitly political, insofar as they critically address colonial, social (racial, gender/sexual, body, and neurotypical), and global subjugation,” she invites us to consider how biennials, as compositions, can host rather than muffle the “subtle but fiery fierceness of artworks that trouble the biennials’ ethico-political content and orientation?”

Considering the work of , Jota Mombaça , , , , , suggests that this “requires inhabiting a rather uncomfortable place, where lie both the ‘invisible and obliterating’ (representation) and the ‘other densities’ that must never become evidence."

📷: muSa Michelle Mattiuzzi, "Merci beaucoup, Blanco!," 2018. Performance. Photo: Francisco Costa.


PASS is a public program of the International Biennial Association.

Black Brazilian artists face the double challenge of commodification and representation. In their works, the body, biology, history, and their significations combine in a form of presentation that refigures Blackness to return political/symbolic violence (that of representation) in a movement that c...

02/23/2021

"What might the curator’s role be, beyond accompanying the production and presentation of new work? ... The role of the has shifted, especially institutional curators: it has shrunk, shriveled to exhibition programming. Conceptual discussions and exchanges about artworks are almost non-existent, except for required administrative interactions. Affinities are rarely developed or discussed."— Zineb Sedira

Read more about 's assessment of the impact of biennials on artistic practice in her conversation with and .


PASS is a public program of the International Biennial Association.

Zineb Sedira talks about the cultural manifestations of solidarity, intimacy, and militancy in the 1960s and explores their afterlives.

02/18/2021

Curator discusses the anticipatory potential of biennials and her exploration of the "curatorial medium of processional performance, harnessing cultural memories in a mix of re-enactment, carnival, funeral and demonstration that was globally inflected, locally enacted and contextually specific. Festival-like in nature and out-of-the-box by design, directed by expansive political thinkers at best and by cultural provocateurs at times, biennials can support such prospective artistic endeavours."

Read Claire Tancons's contribution to PASS (December 2018).

https://passjournal.org/the-cosmic-time-of-biennials-perennial-occurrence-and-human-recurrence/

📷: , "MOVE" (still), 2013, video. Presented at Göteborgs Konsthall as part of AnarKrew: An Anti-Archives, the 7th Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art. Photo: Attila Urbán


PASS is a public program of the International Biennial Association.

Biennials are as necessary as they have become pervasive. Claire Tancons discusses how performativity mediates their cosmic time and urgency.

02/13/2021

From PASS's archive (2018): What if, curator Natasha Ginwala asks, "precarity is the condition of our time – or, to put it another way, what if our time is ripe for sensing precarity? What if precarity, indeterminacy, and what we imagine as trivial are the center of the systematicity we seek?"

This potent question leads to an opening, an invitation to ponder how "the biennial ‘medium’ could perform as a terrain that finds utility in shifting forms of knowledge and responds to the shared vulnerability that has now taken on a planetary scale."

Read more about 's curatorial approach as a prelude to the 13th Gwangju Biennale, opening on February 26th.

📷: Exhibition view of Contour Biennale 8, "Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium," Mechelen, 2017. Photo: Kristof Vrancken.


PASS is a public program of the International Biennial Association.

Curator Natasha Ginwala discusses her biennial practice and the intersection of precarity, the biennial 'medium,' and its double temporality.

02/09/2021

From PASS's archive: In 2018, , co-founder of the defined its dual distinction: the "...emphasis on the role of the artist-curator in biennial making and ... popular participation."

Read more about the history and development of this Indian initiative in an article that echoes our latest conversation with artist Zineb Sedira.

The co-founder of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the "People's Biennale," retraces the history of this artist-led initiative.

02/05/2021

"I am not convinced that the way that I've been asked to 'share' during lockdown is the solution. For me, 'sharing' requires an element of physicality, it requires something (inter)personal; otherwise there is no real communication with an audience. In my experience, videoconferencing quickly becomes tedious and flat because it is hemmed in by a technology that confuses messaging for communication... I hope that our experience of confinement will help us find different models of communication, transmission, and collaboration. There is no real solidarity without physicality." —Zineb Sedira

Read more about 's assessment of the impact of
biennials on artistic practice in her conversation with and .

PASS is a public program of the International Biennial Association.

Zineb Sedira talks about the cultural manifestations of solidarity, intimacy, and militancy in the 1960s and explores their afterlives.

01/30/2021

Coming Soon! London-based, Franco-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira talks about what biennials have meant to her.

01/27/2021

A candid interview with Raqs Media Collective about their curatorial approach for the . Speculative and pragmatic, artist-focused and collaborative, they describe the experience as being "like working with many limbs inside a hologram—in the sense of the projection and interference itself."

Read more about the making of the Yokohama Triennale:
https://passjournal.org/raqs-media-collective-afterglow-interview-the-making-of-the-yokohama-triennale-2020/

Image: Nilbar Güreş, "Unknown Sports Series," 2009. Installation view of Yokohama Triennale 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Galerist, Istanbul. 📷:

A candid interview with Raqs Media Collective about their curatorial approach for the Yokohama Triennale 2020. Speculative and pragmatic, artist-focused and collaborative, they describe the experience as being "like working with many limbs inside a hologram—in the sense of the projection and inter...

01/23/2021

"How can our methodology and interests converge and assemble bodies and peoples as well as structures and fluxes and foster their togetherness instead of limiting itself to discourse, either about ecology or internationalism? Throughout the entire project, we’re trying to imagine new forms of togetherness by mobilizing liquidity: to assert the embodied togetherness of human and non-human bodies, fluxes and flows." --13th Shanghai Biennale curatorial team

In this first episode of an intimate and far-ranging two-part conversation, , , , , and talk with PASS's and about fluidity, collaboration, and what a biennial might leave behind.

In this intimate conversation, the 13th Shanghai Biennale's curators talk about their process, the role of exhibitions, and biennial legacy.