Biennials of the 1980’s

Abstract

The Biennale di Venezia and the documenta were already noticeably influenced by post-modernity in the 1980’s. Site-specific installations became more common, a growing number of countries participated in Venice and there were more and more artists in Kassel. With the creation of further biennials worldwide, the West was for the first time no longer able to claim for itself the sole right to art centers. A ‘global art’ was making its first quiet appearance. Some new biennials initially set themselves the goal of strengthening the region, like the regionally oriented Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh, Dhaka/Bangladesch (1981) founded ten years after the country obtained its independence or the Bienale de l’Art Bantu Contemporain Gabon (1985). In the West, more and more media-specific exhibition forms were being developed like the Foto Triennale in Esslingen, Germany (1989) or the Triennale of Small Sculpture in Fellbach, Germany (1983), which, in 1993, became the model for the Small Sculpture Triennale Seoul which took place twice at the Walker Hill Art Center in South Korea. Similar to the India Triennale, the Cairo Biennale Egypt (1984) was, by contrast, a clearly political instrument used to reveal existing traditions and academic structures. The most important new biennials to this day are, however, the Bienal de la Habana, Cuba (1983) and the International Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (1987). Whereas the Havana Biennale was intended to serve as a counterweight to Western culture, the Istanbul Biennale was supposed to assert or reinforce the geographical and cultural links between Europe and Asia.