Mapping Exhibition Networks: Current histories of biennials

Project description

No more than ten in number around the early 1990s, today hundreds of biennials take place more or less regularly around the world, becoming the standard format for producing and displaying contemporary art. These periodic art exhibitions are usually thematic, as well as conceptual and socially interventionist. Their significant increase in number and geographical dispersal is a phenomenon that fully partakes in the global flows of objects, discourses and people, the expansion of neoliberal economic structures as well as urban development, social engineering, and city branding. The growing literature around the ‘biennial phenomenon’ mainly advances a double-edged approach, describing these mega-shows as both empowering platforms of visibility for local contexts and as responsible for diffusing the Euro-centric canon and reproducing cultural imperialism. While investigations have speculatively explored the empowering or disempowering dynamics of biennials for local contexts, there are no concrete studies yet studying this phenomenon and the worldviews it suggests in a more systematic manner. A number of studies, based often on individual cases, focus mainly on curatorial practices and discourses ─or the discrepancies between discourses and practices ─but more empirical approaches regarding the involved actors, issues of connectivity, modes of access to what Pierre Bourdieu describes as ‘sub-field of restricted production’ that international exhibitions represent, work ethics and public reception are still rare. The study of internationally active artistic and curatorial networks has not yet been systematically pursued. This inquiry seeks to contribute in this direction, by surveying current exhibition networks.

We anchor our interdisciplinary research in art history, social sciences and computer sciences. We are taking a mixed-method approach in the development of our research design integrating qualitative and quantitative analysis. The field that we are describing is the global art world that carries the concept of the ‘contemporary’ as a time concept, meaning, as David Joselit explains, ‘with time’, suggesting flow and a temporary quality. Museums and exhibitions in our time participate in a global exchange of art works. Boris Groys states: “Today’s artistic events cannot be preserved and contemplated like traditional artworks. However, they can be documented, ‘covered’, narrated and commented on. Traditional art produced art objects. Contemporary art produces information about art events.” One of these events is the biennial, an event that is immersed into a global flow of art and shows a certain pulse of time, space, discourse and materiality. Tracing these dimensions of biennials is the goal of this study. What kind of accelerations and deepenings does the specific biennial “pulse” involve and how does it relate to broader spatial and temporal connectivities of the global artistic field?

We reference Actor-Network Theory as a methodological framework to uncover relationships, or, as Bruno Latour coins it, to ‘trace a network.’ Network analysis will be applied in different scales and objects in order to explore the various types of correlations among involved entities/actors, for instance, the associations between exhibiting artists, curators and discourses, or the patterns of connectivity between participating artists and funding bodies. Our networks take into account both human and non-human actors and pay particular attention to the often neglected agency of the artworks themselves; for example, we do not only consider curators as decision-makers in an exhibition network, but we also regard materialities and media as driving forces in the making of an exhibition. A further focus will be to study the categories applied in the presentation of artists and artworks in biennials (nationality, genre, media), while we are also interested in documenting which types of institutional collaborations and affiliations are made visible in the discursive production and self-image that each biennial produces. Network analysis will also apply to specific discursive constellations in curatorial statements, regarding the rhetoric of inclusion, the emphasis on collectivity, collective authorship and the social, interventionist potential of art.

Qualifying biennial actors is a key step of our inquiry. Biennial data often reveal fixed configurations of actors and it is necessary to expand our knowledge of the context and trajectories through which these actors come together. Based on the concept of Sequence Analysis (SA) introduced by Andrew Abbott, we seek to describe biennials through the lens of their actors’ trajectories in order to reassess the alleged inclusivity and diversity of biennial culture against the actual self-regulating connectivity of the art world.

Our data collection draws on diverse sources that, on one hand, offer us an overview and a contextualization of the art world at large and, on the other hand, provide us with two case studies, the documenta 14 (2017) and the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018). The collected data is stored in two different databases, a SQLite relational database and a Neo4J graph database.

Team members

William Diakité is an embedded system engineer graduated from the ENSIM and is currently a PhD student in Arts and Digital Humanities at the University of Rennes 2. Under the supervision of Arts and Aesthetics Professor Nicolas Thély, he studies the research practices involved in the use of textual archives in order to discuss the influence of aesthetic experience on reading and interpretative activities. He also designs corpus-building tools based on NLP techniques.

Dr. Anne Luther is a researcher, curator, and software developer whose work examines art markets and digital provenance. She received her PhD from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, and is currently a researcher at the Department for Modern Art History at the Institute of Art Studies and Historical Urban Studies at Technische Universität Berlin and at The Center for Data Arts at The New School in New York. Her research is grounded in cultural studies, ethnography, and art theory, bridging an interdisciplinary approach to computer sciences, IT, and design. Anne worked in several arts institutions internationally. She is the co-founder of The International Art Market Association Sub-Committee in Berlin.

Dr. Ji Young Park is a postdoctoral researcher of the “Translocations” cluster at Technische Universität Berlin, Germany, and studies the displacement of cultural assets in East Asia. She holds a PhD in Museum studies from Ecole du Louvre in Paris, Université d’Avignon and Université du Québec à Montréal. Her research interests focus on exhibition analysis in terms of art historical knowledge production and communication in the public sphere.

Prof. Dr. Eleonora Vratskidou is a visiting professor of Modern Art History at the Department of Art History and Historical Urban Studies, Technische Universität Berlin. She studied art history, archaeology and cultural studies at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and has been a research fellow at Princeton University, Freie Universität Berlin, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She is a specialist of modern Greek art and cultural history, while her current research interests concern the history of art history, with a particular focus on the role of art practitioners in the shaping of the discipline as well as contemporary art biennials and exhibition networks.

Support

This project is supported by the NA+DAH (Network Analysis + Digital Art History).

The NA+DAH Workshop is a Getty Foundation-supported event that will bring together art historians, network scientists, and digital humanists to advance research at the intersection of these fields.