Arts & International Affairs: 2.3: Autumn/Winter 2017 | Page 82

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
Replicating Cultural Hegemony through Biennials
There is a wealth of literature debating whether it is possible to contest existing power re-
lations through biennials. Filipovic (2014) argues that although biennials claim to offer
a counter model to the modern, Western museum institution, they replicate some of its
questionable paradigms. Despite aiming to decenter the traditional notions of moderni-
ty and give voice to underrepresented cultures, histories, and politics, they most often
end up replicating the Western museum’s frame—the white cube. Arguably, such ho-
mogenization is paradoxical. It goes to the heart of the neoliberal model of globalization
against which many biennials seek to position themselves:
[N]o matter how fervently biennials and large-scale exhibitions insist
on their radical distinction from the idea of the museum, they over-
whelmingly show artworks in specially constructed settings that rep-
licate the rigid geometries, white partitions, and windowless spaces of
the museum’s classical exhibitions, that is, when biennials are not simply
bringing artworks into existing museums without altering their white
cubes. Timeless, hermetic, and always the same despite its location or
context, this globally replicated white cube has become almost categor-
ically fixed, a private “non-place” for the world of contemporary art bi-
ennials, one of those uncannily familiar sites, like the department stores,
airports, and freeways of our period of supermodernity described by
anthropologist Marc Augé. (Filipovic 2014:48).
It is, indeed, quite common to claim that biennials—the Venice Biennale in particu-
lar—play a role in replicating the cultural hegemony of the West or Global North (e.g.
de Duve 2007:681). The logic of this argument often is that having emerged as part of
the modernizing, civilizing, or colonizing projects of the Global North (or West), it is
quite impossible for biennials to escape this legacy. Marian Pastor Roces suggests that
although an “attempt to outstare the colonizer’s gaze” forms part of the shift toward glob-
al art events, these are still “spaces of contest that mirror the spaces created by the forces
contested”. She is thus sceptical that spaces that were produced in the nineteenth centu-
ry for the global diffusion of capitalist power could be converted into spaces for social
justice (Pastor Roces 2010 [2005]:53–54; see also Bakshtein 2015:394). In a similar
tone, Valerie Kabov argues that the Venice Biennale represents the “northern version of
the seeing and representing the world.” In opposition to the Global South and “emerg-
ing markets”, it is tied to “Northern views, needs and agendas” (Kabov 2016:1). Kabov
comes to this conclusion through an analysis of the Venice Biennale as a mechanism for
emerging countries to seek validation from the Global North. She suggests that the Ven-
ice Biennale is a seemingly democratic system that recites postcolonial critiques in its
curatorial rhetorics, but in reality supports and reproduces the existing power relations
and inequalities on the global scale. The Global North still has the power to decide what
gains recognition (Kabov 2016:3–5).
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