Biennials, Triennials, and documenta and Cultural Anthropophagy joint launch with Anthony Gardner and Pablo Lafuente

Join us for the joint launch of Biennials, Triennials, and documenta: The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art, by Anthony Gardner and Charles Green, and Cultural Anthropophagy: The 24th Bienal de São Paulo 1998, co-edited by Lisette Lagnado and Pablo Lafuente.

Gardner and Lafuente will be joined by Yaiza Hernández to consider the increasing emergence of large-scale, international exhibitions against the context of neoliberal globalisation. The case studies included amongst this trajectory – such as the second Bienal de Habana (1986), the Whitney Biennial (1993) and Documenta 11(2002) – and an analysis of the growing roles sponsors, philanthropists and biennial directors, help illustrate the burgeoning global, political and cultural concerns that accompany art today. Placing the 24th Bienal de São Paulo (1998) within such a history, including its emphases on ‘contamination’ and ‘cannibalisation’, will provide the opportunity to test how its particular approach complicates or complements art’s shifting conditions of production, curation and display.

This event is organised by Afterall in collaboration with The Showroom. Biennials, Triennials, and documenta: The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art is published by Wiley Blackwell, 2016. Cultural Anthropophagy: The 24th Bienal de São Paulo 1998 is published by Afterall Books in association with the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2015.

Anthony Gardner is a member of the editorial collective for the MIT Press journal ARTMargins and teaches contemporary art history and theory at the Ruskin School of Art, the University of Oxford. His other books include Mapping South: Journeys in South-South Cultural Relations (Melbourne, 2013), NSK: From Kapital to Capital (co-edited with Zdenka Badovinac and Eda Čufer, Moderna Galerija and MIT Press, 2015), and Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy (MIT Press, 2015).

Yaiza Hernández is pathway leader for the MRes Art: Exhibition Studies run by Central Saint Martins in collaboration with Afterall, her book Tolerancia Represiva. Museo, crítica y producción de públicos will be published by Consonni in 2017.

Pablo Lafuente is a writer and curator based in São Paulo and Porto Seguro, Brazil. He was the co-curator of the 24th Bienal de São Paulo (2014), and the curator of ‘A Singular Form’ in Secession, Vienna, (2014). He’s currently organising the long-term project Zarigüeya /Alabado Contemporáneo at Museo de Arte Precolombino Casa del Alabado in Quito, and is part of the ongoing research group Museal Episode, organised by the Goethe-Institut Latin America. He was one of the founding editors of Afterall Exhibition Histories book series.