Recent times have seen biennales bloom in every neck of the woods. Mapping the state of world art, these exhibitions have become synonymous with globalism. In this new world, curators Hou Hanru and Suhanya Raffel are seasoned campaigners. Hou curated the 2000 Shanghai, 2005 Tirana, and 2007 Istanbul Biennales, and now the 2009 Lyon Biennale, and he has played roles in countless more. Raffel has been on the curatorial team of Queensland Art Gallery’s Asia-Pacific Triennial since 1996, and is lead curator for its latest installment, APT6 (2009). Robert Leonard talked to them about biennale making.

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Robert Leonard: A lot of lofty rhetoric springs from biennales. Their titles and blurbs often read like manifestos. They routinely present themselves as high-minded and socially progressive—forces for good. On the other hand, they’re also caught up in the bidding of governments and sponsors, not to mention the art world’s own politics of inclusion and exclusion. Do biennales live up to their utopian rhetoric?
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Hou Hanru: This is a contradiction we face every day, and not only in biennales. The whole cultural system today is related to political and economic conditions—that’s inevitable. I don’t think we can solve the problem, it’s rather about how to take it up in any given context. Personally, I think—and maybe it’s related to the experiences of my generation—in whatever I do there’s always a necessity to articulate, on the one hand, a critical aspect, and, on the other, a utopian one. My work emphasises optimism—the fact that art can express the imagination. I know that’s idealistic. But then most of the energy behind biennales stems from some kind of idealism, particularly a desire to claim a place in the world.
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Suhanya Raffel: Utopianism and utopian rhetoric are different. I would say, yes, biennales do live up to a utopian idealism, but the rhetoric—that’s another matter. We all work within constraints and there is no absolute freedom, sure, but we still reach for utopia. Yes, art is affected by the politics and economics, but, at the same time, it has a utopian energy that we respond to. In the most highly charged political and economic situations, art is still being made. In Sri Lanka—a country that’s gone through civil unrest, repression, and war—they have just made a biennale. Artists there want it. You have to take that energy seriously.
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Hou: Life goes on. For me, it’s about how to create a situation where different energies can meet and what new possibilities can be produced out of the clash. Biennales are really the most intense moments we see in the art world. People always compare them with the Olympics. But biennales are not about artists competing. If anything, the competition is between the events themselves, each seeking to be more visible or consequential than the rest.
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If biennales are developmental stepping stones, what are they stepping us towards?
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Hou: Outside a few notable exceptions, big cities don’t do biennales. They start in places like Havana, Istanbul, Shanghai, or Gwangju, where there is no established infrastructure. They are created for art communities which don’t yet have museums or a market and they help those communities to develop them. After twenty years of the biennale, a solid art scene has emerged in Istanbul. In addition to the biennale, there are now other initiatives, including private and public foundations with their own galleries. They are all closely related to the biennale—an extension of its influence. In 2000, the Shanghai Biennale was China’s first international biennale. It helped make contemporary artists living in China visible and acceptable in society and forced the authorities to rethink their cultural politics. Consequently, after a few years, China developed policy to export their art, creating a national pavilion for the Venice Biennale.
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Raffel: Biennales are typically impelled by isolation combined with a deep curiosity, a desire to experience work from outside. They are places for contemporary art to be intensely seen and discussed. They foster artists and audiences, provide contextualising educational platforms, and encourage collectors. Biennales ignite all that.
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Hou: Biennales have been evolving. In the beginning, the model was a big show of establishment artists or the most interesting art of the moment. But now biennales are more than that. Now a biennale may be a research project, or a platform for young artists, or it may be deeply concerned with the local context. Biennales are also important in terms of education. More and more, they are conceived not simply as shows, but as interdisciplinary cultural projects. We’re seeing a lot of collaboration between biennales and universities. In the early years, the Sydney Biennale may have been crucial in bringing things like conceptual art to Australia, but it was a very Eurocentric show. Today, it is rather different, with artists from everywhere in the world, and it’s more political as well. In that regard, the last one, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s Revolution—Forms that Turn, was particularly interesting.
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But it too was rather Eurocentric. Christov-Bakargiev wanted to ground the diversity and abundance of global contemporary art back in a European avant-garde tradition. For her, revolution was about return, not rupture. She didn’t want to talk about the way the world has changed. How do you feel about such hybrid projects that fuse the contemporary-art biennale with the historicising museum show?
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Hou: Personally, I enjoy that kind of biennale, even if it’s not the way I do mine. My biennales connect more into the experimental contemporary side. But it’s lucky that we have so many biennales and that it’s still possible to come up with a different approach.
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Raffel: There are times when it’s important to acknowledge histories. In 2002, APT4 included work from the 1960s. But the point was to address contributions artists from the Asia-Pacific  region made to international art that are often ignored, side-lined, or orientalised. It was about history, but new history.
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Hou: Historically, artists from the Asia-Pacific made important contributions to mainstream art but weren’t acknowledged for it. The APT and a few other biennales put this issue on the agenda. As a result of that, the Guggenheim recently staged the exhibition The Third Mind, addressing the way American artists have been influenced by their readings (and misreadings) of Asian culture.
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What impact are biennales having on the way museums do their work?
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Raffel: I can answer that directly, because APT was always already run through a museum. From the outset, the APT had a huge influence on the development of Queensland Art Gallery’s collection—with APT1 (1993) a major group of works entered the collection. The APT experience—particularly the way artists in APT3 (1999), like Surasi Kusolwong, Lee Mingwei, and Jagath Weerasinghe, required audience participation—changed how QAG works with contemporary art. Working interactively with such artists affected not only how we engage with art, it flowed on to how we engage with audiences, to the development of calibrated education and public programs, and to arguing for a cinémathèque.
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Hou: From the outset, biennales went beyond traditional art-museum formats to create a more live space, closer to everyday life. Biennales show that exhibitions need not be limited to the traditional MoMA white-cube model. They have generated different formats for exhibitions and events and this has influenced the transformation of old museums as well as the creation of new ones, like the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Because of the influence of biennales, cities such as Shanghai decided to create new museums. Biennales create opportunities to come up with new models for institutions.
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Is new always good? GoMA wants to be a new kind of  populist art museum. It opened with a cinémathèque presenting a Jackie Chan survey. The Warhol show highlighted his engagement in projects outside of art: his TV shows and Interview. Cartoonist Michael Leunig and TV sitcom Kath and Kim featured in Optimism. GoMA has also had architecture and fashion shows. Is this the influence of the APT, which has long included work that isn’t typically considered contemporary art? Is GoMA about extending the bounds and purchase of contemporary art or about subsuming it within entertainment culture?
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Raffel: Robert, you sound so conservative. Artists are not confined and museums must not be confined. It’s important to be open to all kinds of expression. Take the upcoming Pacific Reggae Project in APT6. Reggae is an important form within the Pacific. For us to exclude it because it doesn’t fit into a specific kind of art discipline is misleading.
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Hou: Personally, I’m not interested in the question of whether things are art or not. Art has always mingled. It belongs to a larger picture, as you see in the history of modern art, with the Russian avant-garde and the Bauhaus for starters.
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I’m not against mingling, and I’m not saying that anything that isn’t art isn’t important, creative, or worthy. I’m just surprised by the erosion of a space or argument for art as such within GoMA.
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Raffel: Maybe that erosion is something that’s happening from within art itself.
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There may be pressure within art to upset the category of art, but there’s also pressure from outside art to incorporate art into wider discourses of ‘culture’ and ‘social history’ (in the case of Te Papa in Wellington) or ‘the creative industries’ and ‘entertainment’ (with GoMA). I’m just surprised by GoMA’s zeal to include everything within art except the very category of ‘art’?
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Raffel: Not so. GOMA’s diversity reflects something already integral to the ‘category of art’, as you put it. With the Warhol exhibition, we chose work across the spectrum of his activity. We showed his paintings, including some magnificent Disaster paintings, alongside his films, videos, television projects, publishing, time capsules, and so on. As curators we have to be lead by the ways artists make art, regardless of the pressure it puts on definitions. With the APT, it is crucial that we address the disparate local conditions and histories within which contemporary art is made, and that idea of contemporary art remains open ended.
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Hou: MoMA and the Pompidou were created in response to the pressures and momentum of their times. So today, it’s important for us to ask, what re the pressures and momentum of our time? Today, contemporary art is spread out all around the world. Globalisation presses us to not just identify with one type of social structure or cultural institution, but to look to diversity. This challenge will be perceived differently by different societies. How should each take it up inventively? It would be a shame to miss this important historical opportunity to create something different.
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With biennales, there’s a tension between globalism and localism, dealing with specific works, specific artists, specific places, specific audiences.
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Hou: I’m always dealing with this tension, between embracing globalism and looking to how particular, how local, art can be.  But then you can always find the global in the local. All my projects have been based on research into the local context. With Istanbul, I started by researching the history of modern Turkey. The republic was one of the first non-Western modernisation projects and modernism influenced the formation and expansion of the city. Istanbul’s international-style buildings reflect this. I asked, what’s the function of the biennale in this context? And then I invited artists who were interested in such questions to react.
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I like the way that you used the Ataturk Cultural Centre as a venue.
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Hou: The Centre reflects how Turkish society thinks about its past, present, and future; economically, politically, and socially. It is currently caught in a crossfire between competing ideologies. It was built in the 1960s in a modernist style as a public space modeled on principles of social democracy, but now developers are threatening to upgrade it into a kind of American-style commercial entertainment complex. The transformation from social democracy to liberal market capitalism, a worldwide phenomena, is being played out here, but in a distinctive way.
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When the APT started, it had a particular relation to the region and its art cultures, but, as the nature and status of region’s art changed, the APT co-evolved.
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Hou: The APT was conceived in the late 1980s, when Australia was looking for a new identity, one related to Asia rather than Europe. It responded in a politically-correct but nevertheless interesting way. In the beginning, there was criticism of the idea that it was promoting Asia and Asian influences, saying the work didn’t look like contemporary art, but this changed. Other societies are going through similar processes, and biennales reflect and push these changes.
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Raffel: It’s almost twenty years since the APT began. Initially it embodied a globalising impetus. It was exploring a region that hadn’t been explored. Of course, it was also about Australia, about Australia’s location in the world. But now, in the wake of so many globalising biennales, APT’s commitment to focus on contemporary art from a particular region sets it apart. I think the regional focus has become its strength.
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Biennales typically exemplify cosmopolitanism, but cosmopolitanism is double-edged. On the one hand, it is about being curious about and engaged with other people and other places; on the other, it presumes a right to go anywhere with ease. The way the APT has necessitated protracted negotiation with different and difficult places seems to challenge this general presumption.
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Raffel: Cosmopolitism is about a certain kind of urbanism. But the Asia-Pacific region is more disparate, with very different economic, social, political, and religious structures and agendas. There’s an urbanising, modernising aspect to the region, but there are other aspects that pull in different directions.
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You are both diasporic. What’s the place of the diasporic in your work?
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Raffel: Where you come from shapes not just your experience but how other people relate to you. It’s hardly ever assumed that I’m Australian—I’m always being asked where I’m from. That’s not to say that this is bad, but it does have an effect. Diasporas have existed as long as people have moved. Borders are porous. People move around even in difficult times, like war, for economic reasons, or just because its possible. Whenever you do anything defined by geography, like the APT, acknowledging diasporas becomes essential. They often provide the voice that challenges neat formulas.
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Hou: Diasporas change societies. A society without a diaspora would be a boring place. Historically, since the creation of nation states, we have tried to exclude the migration dimension, thinking of it as the exception rather than the rule. Nations understand themselves as having a clear-cut territory and limit the movement of people in and out, thus consolidating their power structure. But art, by definition, is exactly the opposite. It’s fluid. It’s about creating dynamics that can challenge such power systems. Even if an artist lives in his own country, he has to be a kind of virtual exile.
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What we can look forward to with your upcoming projects, the Lyon Biennale Spectacle of the Everyday and APT6?
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Hou: Again, I’ve started from the local. In Lyon, you have a large working class and a lot of immigrants. It was in its suburbs that something comparable to the American civil-rights movement emerged. There’s still a lot of confrontation between the young people and authority, the police—it’s intense. I also became interested in the situationists’ critique of the spectacle and the ways the French intellectual tradition has impacted on artists understanding their role in society. So, with the Biennale, I’ve tried to create a platform where people who would usually never meet can live together and work with artists together.  We’ve been able to do some interesting projects. In addition to the exhibition spaces that have been used many times before, we have brought in other sites.
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Raffel: In APT6, we will be looking at North Korea, by working with the Mansudae Art Studio and with co-curator Nicholas Bonner, a Beijing-based film-maker who has been in contact with North Korean artists and film-makers since the early 1990s. These artists make art under a system where every aspect of production (in art as well as industry) is collectivised. At Mansudae they produce mosaics for public buildings, textiles, carpet designs, propaganda posters, as well as traditional brush-and-ink paintings, calligraphy, woodcuts, and oil paintings. Including them in the APT challenges assumptions about what contemporary art is, but then the APT has consistently been concerned with how artists live and work under diverse conditions throughout the region. Obviously, working with North Korea is fraught and it’s impossible sustain any cosmopolitan illusions in dealing with that part of the world. It’s taken us five years of conversations to get to this point, but there’s been a will on both sides to make something happen. APT’s regional focus really distinguishes it. The great  international art-curatorial caravan doesn’t go to Pyongyang or to Port Vila in Vanuatu. But the APT does. Because of this, it privileges dissonance and provides a platform for very dissimilar perspectives.

 

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Biennale de Lyon 2009: The Spectacle of the Everyday, 16 September 2009—3 January 2010. 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 5 December 2009–5 April 2010.